Which distro for an old notebook

elm669

elm669

2[H]4U
Joined
Jul 8, 2003
Messages
2,463
Just pulled out my old Compaq armada 7792dmt which was sitting around collecting dust without an os and was trying to figure out which distro had the best hardware support for it.

specs:
Mobile Pentium 266mhz
144mb edo ram
5gb hdd
S3 Aurora 64+ 2mb
ESS 1878 sound card, plug & play
13" tft 1024x768
Ibm credit card adapter II cardbus
12x cdrom

I tried Suse 7.0 retail which I got for free but has no sound support, but everything else including the net card works. just the sound problem
frown.gif
 
You are probably just going to have to try some different distros until you find one that works. You also might try searching for a driver for that sound card, but I doubt you'll find one. Other than that, you could parse through the supported hardware lists of the distros and look for your laptop model.

 
I've heard good things about VectorLinux they are aiming at a fast responsive experience on older machines.

I haven't tried it as desktop, but used it for folding on run level 3 (I use the Fold-Server now).

-E

 
nuclearfly said:
You are probably just going to have to try some different distros until you find one that works. You also might try searching for a driver for that sound card, but I doubt you'll find one. Other than that, you could parse through the supported hardware lists of the distros and look for your laptop model.

Click to expand...
Definetly having problems with the sound card, Everthing BUT the sound card works under freebsd 4.11 and suse 7.0
mad.gif
both act like it doesn't exist. Gonna try vector and dsl later tonight and maybe fedora.
u_83288
 
DSL is sexy; try it before vector! (warning: i say this with no knowledge whatsoever about vector :p)

 
I have been able to successfully install Slackware 9.0 on a computer with the following specs:

Pentium MMX @ 200mhz
32 mb of ? RAM
2gb Diamond Stealth Video Card
4gb Quantum Hard Drive

XFce worked fine on it. Don't try either KDE or GNOME.

I am currently in a similar situation. I used a free Shipit! Ubuntu Warty CD but was terribly disappointed at the fact that PIII / 733 / 128 isn't powerful enough to run it.

I'm considering Vector.
 
alexyang said:
I am currently in a similar situation. I used a free Shipit! Ubuntu Warty CD but was terribly disappointed at the fact that PIII / 733 / 128 isn't powerful enough to run it.
Click to expand...
How odd, I've got Ubuntu Hoary running Gnome on an old laptop with a PII-300 and 64MB of RAM. It's a bit slow to start up but still very usable.
 
It is definitely usable, but occassionally, it starts to just crawl due to excessive memory usage.

I've finally gone past dependency hell and I've installed fluxbox and openbox.

Now, to make GDM recognize them...
 
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