[NCLUG] Little Lunuxes anyone?

Chad Perrin perrin at apotheon.com
Mon Dec 18 14:38:51 MST 2006


On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 10:15:23AM -0700, Mica Fine wrote:
> Which is your favorite for old laptops, and why?

As David Braley mentioned, a minimal Debian install is a pretty good
choice.  DSL may or may not be better -- I don't know quite that much
about it, currently.  My last laptop (which has recently suffered
failure of the screen, unfortunately) was a Thinkpad 600E, with a
Pentium 2 processor and 128MB of ram.  A minimal Debian install, with
the user environment being built one APT command at a time, gave me a
very high-functioning, lightweight system that served my needs better
than any default install of any distribution was likely to do.

In general, the "build from a minimal install" approach is probably your
best bet no matter what distribution you choose, with the possible
exception of certain distributions whose default installs are
specifically designed to be lightweight (such as DSL).  Last I checked,
many distributions with a comprehensive package management system
comparable to APT have a slightly more weighty "minimal" install than
Debian, though the last time I checked was a couple years ago.  Even so,
the difference is not great, and you're probably okay going with almost
any major distribution's "minimal" install as long as it supports your
hardware and provides a software management system that makes choosing
and installing applications a trivial operation (APT, YUM, et cetera
come to mind).

For distributions that provide a lightweight default install complete
with all the trimmings, however, I have heard more unqualified good
things about Damn Small Linux than any other, similarly targeted Linux
distribution.

If you want to go the "major distro, minimal install" route, you might
also consider something like FreeBSD.  Just a thought.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"It's just incredible that a trillion-synapse computer could actually
spend Saturday afternoon watching a football game." - Marvin Minsky



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