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Looking for advise on a distro to try on a really old laptop. CPU is Pentium II 300 Mhz. Has 130 MB of memory, 6 Gig hard drive. I can pass along any other specs if helpful. Thanks for any suggestions.
AntiX 32-bit
ArchBang 32-bit
Crunchbang++
Possibly TinyCore (or MultiCore from the same people) or Puppy Linux?
Virtually any modern Linux is going to be a bit of a dog on that hardware. For example any modern browser will max it out, although some worse than others.
Perhaps Linux would not be your best option. You might check out one of the BSD variants that supports 32-bit Pentium.
I like FreeDOS, but getting the networking to fly might be too much of a pain.
KolibriOS is a totally from ASM operating system that should fly on that machine, but the software options are pretty limited unless you are an ASM coder.
Head over to Distrowatch and do a search for 32-bit distributions when you get a chance. That will give you some options for testing and comparing that might help you find what you want.
OpenBSD is much lighter than your lightest Linux distro and nowadays even has better support for what is now an odd, 32-bit architecture. So I would give that a try. The installation process is pretty easy and the documentation is by far the best of its kind.
You can probably even run the FVWM window manager on it but the odds of being able to use any any trendy graphical programs like a current productivity suite or browser are rather slim. If you stay mostly text only or else use very old-school graphical programs you might get some use out of the machine though.
Note, on this system the OpenBSD kernel re-link step will probably fail. That will not cause issues with booting. That re-link can be disabled, but I do not remember how.
Last edited by jmccue; 04-26-2024 at 08:24 AM.
Reason: added note
"And now for something completely different"
You might try Alpine Linux. You will want to read up on it first, but it is very small, very fast, and seriously optimal for low hardware. It does require a network connection to fully install. It runs well as either a server or desktop OS, as a virtual guest, as a minimal VM host, or a mixture: being refined for exactly such use.
IT is intended to be installed and then configured for the intended use via software installation and configuration rather than being optimized out of the box for a specific use. Also it avoids SystemD and does not depend upon Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL/Fedora, Arch, or any other distribution as a parent.
In some ways this is the Linux distribution that most reminds me of BSD back when we had a dozen
As long as we're recommending veneration of the BSDs I'd suggest the OP give GhostBSD.
GhostBSD is fine in some contexts, but its not usable on a 300 MHz Pentium II with 130 MB of RAM. Even OpenBSD would be pushing the limit as i386 is no longer a fully supported architecture. NetBSD, which has already been suggested, might be the way to go, if BSD is an option.
But of the Linuxes it is likely that Alpine, mentioned already, is among the lightest. I used to run it in on some production servers and appreciated the simplicity. A big plus with Alpine is that it is free from systemd, thus some of that simplicity is through the avoidance of that hot mess. As a server system, the Alpine which I ran had basically almost nothing other than the few processes running which I had added. So +1 for Alpine though 130 MB of RAM will likely not be enough for a GUI unless special considerations are made such as using only a really lightweight window manager and skipping an attempt at running a full blown desktop environment.
Last edited by Turbocapitalist; 04-26-2024 at 09:03 PM.
Reason: link fixed
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