Best for old laptop

S

shaft

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 3, 2004
Messages
371
any ideas on the best distro for an old laptop, heres specs

Armada 1750
PII 365
128 ram
6.5gb hd
Microsoft MN-520 wireless card

any help is appreciated, I have tried Fedora 7, not enuff ram, PCLinuxOS, too slow on the hardware, and DSL, but I cant get wireless card to work, dam small linux would prolly be best, but I cant get the card to work, it works in PCLos tho
 
I've got Debian on my P2 400/192MB and it runs great. Stick a newer HDD in there and it'll quicken that beast up a lot, they use less power as well.
 
i'd stay with one of the lightweight distro's like dsl or tinyme and definetly stay away from kde and gnome for the the de

start with the livecd to make sure that it works with your laptop

note: tiny me is a variant of pclos so if that worked with you wireless .....
 
Hands down debian with xfce

DSL, although incredibly small and efficient, i believe is built off of the 2.4 kernel..

Although the idea posted above about the livecd would make sense on an adequately clocked computer.. on an old laptop like that, the LiveCD would run terrible.

Put the wireless drivers on a stick and compile them manually?
 
to add another pain in the butt, the cdrom in this thing stops working after it gets warm............errrrrrr
 
if you aren't averse to using Windows.... Windows 2000 is definitely one of the best you can get for a computer with less than 256mb of ram (but more than 64) and a more than 166mhz CPU.

if its strictly linux you are after, a minimal Arch linux installation is what I'd personally use, however, if thats not your thing, a minial (no gui) debian installation + IceWM = WIN
 
I used to have an Intel 233mhz P1 with MMX laptop, and I ran Slackware with Fluxbox. Pretty quick, and decent on features. Plus it was pretty easy to swap over to KDE or Gnome if you wanted to. With the HDD space you stated, a full slackware install should fit no problem. I was able to get v9 and v10 if I recall on the 2gb drive that came with mine. I could never get encryption working with wireless when I had that laptop, but things have changed since 2003...
 
i had win 2k on it for her, but she gets virus/spyware, so i want to avoid that headache, i just think getting linux running on it is a short term pain, long term relief
 
Stay away from KDE and GNOME on hardware that old.. they're just too demanding. Look into a lighter weight Desktop manager..
 
tinyme works good on my old lap top but has small problems with streaming audio. From the same forum as tinyme thier is also PCFluxboxOS . Works good too and nothing fancy to take up too much memory,hard drive or time loading so may keep you cd rom cool.
 
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