"Light" distro for a 500 MHz PIII?

[mengle]

My fiancee is finally going to allow me to put linux on her now "old" PC. It's a Dell PIII with 256 MB and runs at something like 500 or 600 MHz.

Here's the deal: I can only use about 5 GB of hard drive space so I need to keep it to a small install. Also she's on dial-up so I'd like to have most of my applications available from CD-ROM rather than something like gentoo where you have to download source files all the time (Don't get me wrong; I love gentoo). And I'd like to keep it kind of light (i.e. not something like RedHat or Mandrake) so it doesn't take forever to load up and I don't need 5 applications for every purpose. (I'd rather select what I want). Lastly, I want it to be something that's fairly easy to install (I don't ever want to go through a Gentoo Stage 1 install ever again).

Any ideas?

Note: I've always sorted of avoided Debian and Debian-based distros because my understanding was it ran older, more stable version of apps. I'm more of a cutting-edge guy but maybe my assumption is wrong.

[ph34r]

Any distro should run fine on that box....

[serz]

Any distro would run fine on that, unless you use KDE/GNOME (they will run but slowly). Use a window manager and you will be fine.

[mengle]

Yeah I use fluxbox on my gentoo machine so I thought I'd just stick with that since I know how to use it and all.

[bae127]

I run slackware 9.1 on a 466 Celeron laptop with 192 meg of ram. KDE is a little slow -- but it runs. I usually use blackbox and more recently XFCE window managers.

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by ph34r
Any distro should run fine on that box....

I would agree !!!

Why not do a bit of research to find a suitable distro that you like and support your particular hardware?

http://old.lwn.net/Distributions/

http://www.distrowatch.com

[sharth]

if you installed gentoo, you could probably use distcc to get the compiles to go quicker...

but yeah, woody can be a bit old... But if you wait a few months (hopefully), then debian sarge will be released and you'd have kinda sorta new packages. :)

[knute]

Originally posted by sharth
if you installed gentoo, you could probably use distcc to get the compiles to go quicker...

but yeah, woody can be a bit old... But if you wait a few months (hopefully), then debian sarge will be released and you'd have kinda sorta new packages. :)

So you simply put the testing and/or unstable links into your /etc/apt/sources.list and update!

Viola.

hehehe... I have dial-up myself, and it only takes something like 2 hours to update the lists normally. :D

[mengle]

I'm going to give the new Mandrake Community 10.0 a shot but try to scale it way back. Thanks for the help everyone. I just wasn't sure what I could get away with on the computer.

[knute]

Originally posted by mengle
I'm going to give the new Mandrake Community 10.0 a shot but try to scale it way back. Thanks for the help everyone. I just wasn't sure what I could get away with on the computer.

Man, your box is big enough to do most things.

Hell, up until this last Christmas when I upgraded my mbd and processor, I was using an AMD K6/II 300, with 128M of ram, and I was running debian on it.

It could do everything that I wanted except for play dvd's smoothly. So once I upgraded to what was supposed to be an Athalon 1.6Ghz processor (but will only run at 1.2), I can now watch DVD's on my machine without any problems.

[mengle]

That's good to know. I'm still stuck in the Windows/Intel-lead mentality that if a computer is more than 3 years old, it useless. I need to remember that linux is generally a litle more efficient.

[mengle]

Damn! I made room for a 5 GB chunk on the computer's hard drive but when I tried to indtall Mandrake it wouldn't let me make the linux partitions more than 1.8 GB so I didn't install it. I have had this problem before and someone said that Windows puts some files near the end of the hard drive that defragmenting won't move so you can only use a small portion of the free space. Anyone have any ideas to fix this (other than spending $80 on partition magic). Thanks.

[knute]

if I remember right opening up a dos window in windows, and running thd command defrag /p would move everything.

I know that there is a switch to move everything to the begninning of the drive, but it's been quite a while since I've had to use it.

Look in the fips docs on the cd. It may give you information about that. If nothing else use Microsofts knowledge base, and search for defrag and switches.

HTH

[DMR]

Originally posted by knute
if I remember right opening up a dos window in windows, and running thd command defrag /p would move everything.Yes, at least it used to- I haven't used that method in ages either though.

Windows isn't the only beast that puts hidden and/or system files at the end of a partition- Norton Utilities is another culprit that comes to mind. Setting your "view" options in Windows Explorer (the location of the exact settings varies between Win versions) to show hidden and system files is a good place to start, as is (for some Win versions at least) deleting your Swapfile before defragging.


mengle,

In terms of the specs of your machine and its ability to run a given distro:

I have a P-III 500 w/256M RAM running 6 operating systems- Redhat 9.0 and 7.3, Mandrake 8.0, Win 98, Win 2k Pro, and Win XP Pro. I run both KDE and Gnome, and while Gnome runs faster than KDE, both perform acceptably well- certainly not any slower than either of my Windows environments.

In terms of "so it doesn't take forever to load up and I don't need 5 applications for every purpose", all you need to do is to perform a custom install and choose only those applications and services that you want/need.

Windows isn't exactly "intelligent" in this area either, by the way- do a standard workstation install of Win 2K or XP, and then go to Programs->Administrative Tools->Services. A couple (of many) things you might find:

- Did you assign static IP information when you configured your network settings? If so, why did Windows install and activate the DHCP client service?

- Did you set up any Remote Access capabilities during the install? If no, why are all sorts of RAS-related services still getting activated at bootup?

[mengle]

Hey Knute and DMR,
Thanks for the input/ideas. I may give qtparted on knoppix a shot first and I'll definitely have to do a custon install to limit the number of packages that get installed. I'm glad to hear that it should run well. I hope to get around to it later this week.

[Digit0]

Just today I installed knoppix (dist-upgrade to sid) on an IBM aptiva pIII 500 w/128 of ram...

kde runs fine, the slownes comes when loading kde/gnome appz, think tiz that old HD though (and a bit more memory would not hurt either).

[DMR]

A bit OT, but:
Black is the color of my true love's hair
I love the ground on where she stands

"Her lips are like some rosy fair
The purest eyes and the neatest hands"

Quite an old song- nice sig, mengle. :)

[mengle]

Yay, gold star for you. :) Thanks. To be honest I had never heard of that song until a few months ago one of my favorite bands (Twilight Singers) released an EP by that name with a cover of the song on it. I've more recently heard some of the older soul versions which I like as well.

Maybe we'll have to get together sometime a listen to some old songs given that you just live on the other side of "the hill" from me (aka the Sierras).

[leyb]

Hey Mengle!
As previously said any distro should do you fine.
I run Slackware Current on my PII 265 Mhz with 92Mb of ram on 2gigs of space. It runs great. Of course big apps like OO hang for a litle while initiating, but they do ok.
And with Slackware you always know what you're putting into you system.
You may also wan to take a look at Arch Linux.
heres a quote form their site
Arch Linux uses i686-optimized packages which gives us improved performance over some of our i386-optimized cousins. This means that Arch Linux will only run on a Pentium II processor or higher. We try to stay fairly bleeding edge, and typically have the latest stable versions of software.
Have Fun!

[markj]

i have a similar system and i would reccommend arch linux as well http://www.archlinux.org one tip make sure you know the names of the modules you will need

[DMR]

Originally posted by mengle
I've more recently heard some of the older soul versions which I like as well. It's a lot older than soul even- you can find versions of the song dating back a couple of hundred years. I think it was originally a traditional English ballad.

:)

[DMR]

Originally posted by mengle
I've more recently heard some of the older soul versions which I like as well. It's a lot older than soul even- you can find versions of the song dating back a couple of hundred years. I think it was originally a traditional English ballad.

:)


As far as getting "over the hill", I always tell JL members that they've got a free tour guide if they ever get to the San Francisco area (I specialize in knowing where all the good pubs are!) :D