[NCLUG] linux for old 95 machine?

[Bob Proulx]

Degutan White 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 recently bought an HP d220 2.2GHz Celeron D with 256M of ram and a
40G disk drive for $21 on eBay.  If you are patient and shop around
you can find *something* for a good price.  I think that is your best
course of action.

A 64M ram machine makes a fine dedicated firewall machine.  Don't run
X Windows.  Just use the text console and ssh.

> I'd like them to read e-mail, but that's about all they really need.   

What email client would you have them run?

> Web would be nice, too, but I'm thinking probably unlikely.

I used Debian up through Sarge on a 96M ram 233MHz AMD k6 laptop
machine acceptably well with X Windows running a couple of terminals,
emacs always running and Galeon.  Galeon is an older now dead browser
that focused on being "the web and only the web" and therefore ran
with good performance in low memory environments.  But the web has
gotten very memory hungry and Firefox was way too much for it.  And
the web which was once about accessibility has gotten very fancy and
quite difficult to use with less than a monster system.  That and a
soda pop spilled into the machine caused me to retire it from the
coffee table and upgrade to a newer machine.

> I'd appreciate some recommendations...
> 
> I've only used ubuntu, and don't have any familiarity with Puppy or  
> DSL.    Is DSL my only real bet?

The operating system isn't the problem.  Any of the current popular
ones would do okay and the same as each other.  The problem is the
limitation on what applications you can run on it.  Or rather with
only 64M of ram what application (singular, not plural) you run on it.

A text console only is obviously going to work okay.  A graphical X
Windows desktop with something light like twm or fvwm will run with a
text terminal and will probably be acceptable by itself.  LDE might be
okay.  But you are squeezed because Firefox would be way too memory
heavy and anything less would have trouble accessing most email web
sites since most of those are very heavy with Javascript.

Bob