Recomend a distro for Pentium-M based computers with low RAM
 

Hey folk,

I'm new here, please correct me if I have posted this in the wrong area...

I've been a *ix user for a long time now, having grown up on the Macintosh, and switching to OS X as soon as it came out. I've been using Linux for about half that time, and would say I'm a very experience user. I have experimented with sooo many distros over the last 2-3 years on several different systems. Anyway, I've recently gotten into the Retro Computing scene and found myself purchasing an old Dell Lattitude D-505 (2003 model with wifi to boast) for dirt cheap, and have been looking at revive it and make it my main computer for programming (mostly Perl, SHELL/BASH, HTML5/CSS) and graphics. I have successfully installed Ubuntu and Xubuntu on the computer which required me to use -- forcepae -- forcepae during install. So while I am completlely happy with Ubuntu, it's my favorite OS so far, I would like to give another distro a shot. If you could recomend me a non-Suse, Slackware, Redhat, Arch based system that be great, XFCE and apt-get are a plus.

Thanks.

You say low RAM but have to force PAE and can run Ubuntu. I ran Gentoo and OpenBox on my main desktop with 2 GiB of RAM for years. It consumed about 95 MiB of RAM with GUI loaded. I'd say try Gentoo, once you grasp how it works you will fall in love with it ... I did.

AntiX is designed for old hardware and is based on Debian stable...

Ah yes, AntiX sounds cool, I'm familiar with Debian, and I've played with MEPIS a little bit. I think I'll give that a try. My Latitude currently has a Gb and a half and 40 Gigs HD which I may upgrade soon to 60 Gb and more ram, so I wander if that will waste all that extra space then.


About Gentoo, a section of their website mentions that it is based off of Linux, or FreeBSD, which I've never heard before. So are they two seperate distributions, or is there a mixture of Linux and BSD software in their distribution? It sounds like a cool OS, but it looks too much like Arch from what I saw in the screenshots.

Gentoo really is not a distribution, it is a set of tools to build your own Linux. Or your own FreeBSD. You will end up with an installation that is unique. Custom tailored for your hardware and to your wishes.

My Pentium M Panasonic CF -48 and IBM Z60M with low ram rocks on AntiX 15.

Nuff said, I guess.

Thanks for the ideas. I went ahead and installed MX Linux/AntiX... It was speedy, not as fast as Xbuntu, and it was a really quick install but it was really messy, and nothing worked (so many glitches). I'm going to just stick with Xubuntu for now, I think. I should be getting a Gateway desktop pretty soon though from a friend of mine, and I think I will load some GNU system on that.

Thanks again.

Which version of Xubuntu are you using? The latest?

I run debian stable with XFCE on similar hardware(Pentium M 1.6GHz, 2GB of ram). It probably wouldn't be much different than runnig Xubuntu though. Debian still has i386 non-pae installation media available which I used. However, during installation, Debian automatically detected that my Pentium M was pae capable despite what the cpu was reporting and installed the pae kernel anyway. With any other distro I had to use the forcepae option to get it to go.

I've debian for a while before, Ubuntu I believe is also based off it. Anyway I am really happy with Xbuntu. It runs super fast and everything works really well out of the box. I'm hooked.