A Linux Distro For Crappy PCs

[extremerigman]

I cant believe it many new Linux Distros require more ram more HDD space and more processing speed. I am looking for a new distro which is made for crappy PC's.

I think mandrake 9.0 does not allow for 486 Pc's.

Anyway thanx

[Gremlin]

Mandrake 8.2 pretty sure thats what I've got sitting here on an old 486 laptop.

FreeBSD or Debian most likely still install fine on older machines.

[Kenno]

If you have old CPU such as 486, I believe you should not run Mandrake. Mandrake needs faster CPU, I might be wrong but I think Mandrake needs 586 and above.

Now, I'm running Mandrake 9.0 on my old PII computer, and guess what? It's slow. Try Debian as being suggested by Gremlin. :)

[Gremlin]

I can say that If your not runnin an XServer then Mandrake 9.0 runs absolutely fine on a P233 (ok thats a little guntier than a 486 but its hardly using 1% CPU, just spent today installing one to replace my Smoothie, wanted MNF on it and some other bits and pieces to play with.

[fatsanchez]

dont use debian, the installer is terrifying.

try slackware instead, its the most 1337 of all the distros, and its pretty simple to get up and running :)

[sparkles]

or another one you may wanna try is gentoo (http://www.gentoo.org), i haven't ever used it myself, but given you are able to customise the install quite a lot you should be right if you get rid of most of the gui stuff.

that is, unless you like to actually point and click things :D

at which point, debian or freebsd all the way!

[Chaos Archon]

Originally posted by fatsanchez
dont use debian, the installer is terrifying.

try slackware instead, its the most 1337 of all the distros, and its pretty simple to get up and running :)

Second that.


But remember its only a 486 so dont expect Xwindows to run like a dream, just like you would'nt expect win98 to run smooth, but if you do a small install and remove any un-used apps and compile a good kernal for your system you should be on your way.

also note there are good non-X programs out there, for instance i had a p100 constantly running as a mp3 player and a icq client and it worked like a charm.

[haytona]

mandrake used to be standard redhat distribution but compiled for 586 (i.e. pentium)