[NCLUG] linux for old 95 machine?

Chris Ingham chris.ingham at hotmail.com
Sun Dec 27 13:41:28 MST 2009


For "in-law" usability, I would definitely go with Puppy or Silatz over DSL.  I would bet either of those would fare well on that old a PC if anything would...

Chris

> Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2009 16:58:44 -0700
> From: perrin at apotheon.com
> To: nclug at lists.nclug.org
> Subject: Re: [NCLUG] linux for old 95 machine?
> 
> 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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