What ditribution would be suited for a 450 MHZ Pentium 3

fishmeester · 12-17-2005, 01:57 PM

Hello.

My PC is a 1999 450 MHZ Pentium 3, with about 64 MB RAM.

My question is, what distribution(s) would you suggest using on such an old machine?

It will be used mainly for simple browsing and chatting, nothing too heavy.

KimVette · 12-17-2005, 06:03 PM

FWIW, I run SuSE on a dual celeron (472Mhz right now I think, the celeron is the Celeron 300A which is basically a Pentium II chip with a very small but chip-speed cache) and it runs just fine. Pick ANY distro and just don't load all the eye candy and don't run 2,391,273 programs in the background and it will be very usable.

Ion Silverbolt · 12-18-2005, 12:21 AM

Damn Small Linux is a good choice. With its default install you should have all the tools you need and it's made for older computers. You can also test it as it's also a Live CD.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

gunnix · 12-18-2005, 04:38 AM

I'd install arch linux. www.archlinux.org

It boots fast and runs fast and is very simple to administrate and install programs.

Use the 7.1 iso if you would install it. (not 7.0 ! )

grtz,
gunnix

linmix · 12-18-2005, 05:05 AM

Sorry to disagree with you KimVette, but I tried Suse on an AMD K2 500 with 128 Mb RAM and it simply couldn't make Suse work at a reasonable speed. Suse automatically loads so many things you need to disable before it becomes in the least manageable.

You are right in the sense that heavy desktops like KDE or Gnome won't work properly and you'll have to look for a lighter and faster desktop environment like Fluxbox or XFCE

gunnix · 12-18-2005, 08:57 AM

As window manager I'd use icewm with silverxp theme, menu made by menumaker.
Read this: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7774&page=1

Emelfm (1) or xfe as file manager (i much prefer emelfm),
opera as browser,
aterm as terminal,
sylpheed-claws or muttng for mail,
xmms for music,
mplayer for videos
graveman or gcombust to write cd's
abiword to write documents
vim as editor, or nedit
chatting: an irc client trough bitlbee for all networks,
or tmsnc, amsn for msn
........

arch linux as operating system.

juankasalas · 12-18-2005, 10:58 AM

i install suse 9.1 on a similar computer and works fine. you would try it.

mipia · 12-18-2005, 02:46 PM

Any of the above would work. Personaly Slackware has been my distribution of choice. It's always worked on any system I have tried. It still runs on a PentiumMMX 166mHz i have with fluxbox with no problems.