P133 32 M Ram Compaq laptop: Which distro and version?

[Bagleemo]

Hello All Y'all -

Having succesfully installed Linux (thanks to all the great help I got here) on my home PC, I am now interested in getting it going on ye olde laptop - A Pentium 133 Compaq Armada 1530 DM with a whopping 32 megs of ram. Windows 98 runs too slowly to stay on there...I'll need a distro thats not too processor intensive. I'll sacrifice features for speed.

So, can anyone reccomend a distro and version to try to install on there? Suse says 7.1 supports a very similar model, but I don't see any way of downloading it from their site. And I don't know if this machine is too lame for that.

Which distro and how shall I go about getting it?

Thanks -
-Amos

[heron26]

Hi,
I have Vector Linux on a couple old machines, one of which is a laptop faster than yours but which also ran Win98 at turtle speeds.

Vector Linux is quick to download from their site (although the newest version cannot be downloaded as an ISO, but is downloaded as 3 files to DOS, plus a couple small diskette images to RAWRITE for your boot disks for the install.

It is quickly downloaded even with a majorly slow modem connection.

It runs quickly on even older P75 or less, with a windows manager on almost any machine I have used it on.

The install is pretty effortless. I had no trouble with my laptop only a few problems when using it on old 486's or such (which i solved by using their older versions)

The CD's can be purchased also with a manual.

It isn't one of the mainstream distros but for older machines (which is all I have) it is great.

heron

[madmonkey]

Well if you don't plan on running X then any distro will be fine on your old laptop... :) However, assuming that you do plan on running X, try using a less memory-intensive window manager such as fvwm instead of Gnome or KDE. That will make more difference than changing distros as X+window manager is what really sucks up the RAM. I have a laptop very similar to yours and it was sloooow with Mandrake 8.0 and KDE... switching window managers helped greatly. As far as lightweight distros go, try Debian, though (just so you know) the install program won't be as user-friendly as RedHat or Mandrake. But you can do it... ;)

[Bagleemo]

Thank you for the great reccomendations!
I hear you that the window manager is the resource hog here in question....
What I need the machine to be able to run is evolution and abiword - that should be about it. If evolution is too much of a hog I can probably live with Jpilot instead - so long as I can synch with my palm I'll be allright..
I sort of know gnome 1.4 fairly well nowadays. Is there an older version of it that could run decently on a machine like the one in question?

Also : When downloading distros, I guess the important file is the .iso file. Do I have to unpack this onto a cd somehow (does that make it bootable?)

Thanks,

Amos

[bammbamm808]

Runs decent, but the box only has 32MB RAM. Upping it would prolly help a whole lot.