[NCLUG] linux for old 95 machine?

[Michael Riversong]

That definitely squares with my experience -- sorry if that wasn't clear in my previous post.

Many people like Debian because it can be made less complicated.  Unfortunately, when dealing with older machines, it's not always possible to make even a minimal installation work and hope to weed out unnecessary things later.  In some cases, particularly with Slackware, it is possible to strip an installation down tremendously but that takes a lot of time which might be better used finding a more contemporary machine.

-----Original Message-----
>From: Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com>
>Sent: Dec 27, 2009 12:11 AM
>To: Northern Colorado Linux Users Group <nclug at lists.nclug.org>
>Subject: Re: [NCLUG] linux for old 95 machine?
>
>On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 10:58:10PM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
>
>Actually, different Linux distributions *can* pose more or fewer
>problems, because of their concepts of what constitutes a minimal install
>and their dependencies.  The only way your distribution choice doesn't
>make any difference in the long term is if you decide you'll ignore the
>package management system and start digging into the guts of the system
>to rip out things that are installed as part of the minimal system, and
>add things via compilation from tarball with alterations to the build
>defaults in makefiles.  Ubuntu, for instance, tends to involve much more
>significant dependency requirements than vanilla Debian when aiming for
>lightweight configurations, in my experience.
>
>-- 
>Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]


Michael Riversong

Cheyenne, Wyoming

Beautiful Music for the whole universe!

http://home.earthlink.net/~mriversong