[NCLUG] linux for old 95 machine?

Chad Perrin perrin at apotheon.com
Sat Dec 26 16:58:44 MST 2009


On Fri, Dec 25, 2009 at 04:41:33PM -0700, Brennen Bearnes wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 25, 2009 at 4:35 PM, Degutan White <degutan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > The in-laws have wireless and a win95 machine with 64mb ram and one
> > 2gig HD and a 1gig HD.   Any recommendations for them?   (besides buy
> > a new computer from system76)
> ...
> 
> > I've only used ubuntu, and don't have any familiarity with Puppy or
> > DSL.    Is DSL my only real bet?
> 
> While I'm sure you could pick up better hardware for the next thing to
> free, I have a machine of roughly that vintage doing just fine on a
> relatively recent Debian.

Keeping in mind that I haven't really installed Debian on any of my
computers in the last three years . . . I think vanilla Debian should be
fine for most purposes on older hardware.  As long as you stick to a
pretty minimal install, and add only the packages you need (maybe use
something like Fluxbox for the GUI), it should work fine in under a gig
of hard drive space.  I've run a slim but quite capable Debian system
with the full install, including all my everyday applications, fitting
into less than 500MB easily.  Actually, I think that included my data
too, but then most of my data is text files.  Plain text can pack into
very small spaces, without even bothering to use any compression.

One major change since those days is the weight of Mozilla applications,
though.  Firefox alone is a huge inflation in storage and memory resource
consumption, so while I was able to include Firebird (pre-1.0 Firefox)
into that small bit of storage space at the time, you might want to find
something lighter than Firefox to use now.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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