low-requirements Linux

[sleipnir214]

I have been given the challenge of trying to make a Linux workstation out of an old Pentium 166 machine with 32 MB of RAM.

Is such a thing possible?
If so, can you recommend a distribution?

Want the best answers? Ask the best questions!

TANSTAAFL!!

 

[Chacalinc]

When you install a regular distribution, you often end up installing a lot of programs that you would probably never use. They're just sitting there taking up (precious) disk space. It's not hard to get an LFS system installed under 100 MB. Does that still sound like a lot? A few of us have been working on creating a very small embedded LFS system. We installed a system that was just enough to run the Apache web server; total disk space usage was approximately 8 MB. With further stripping, that can be brought down to 5 MB or less. Try that with a regular distribution.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org

!!!

Chacal, Inc.

 

[Chacalinc]

BTW, the previus post was get from

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/index.html

under the question Why would I want an LFS system?

Cheers.

Chacal, Inc.

 

[Tarwn]

I have been looking at several for a slightly less powerful machine. I have tried some and not tried others but:
tomsrtbt - floppy-based system, console if I remember corretly
Sisela - another floppy-based one, again I think it was console, not sure
Small Linux - wrote it down, don't remember anything about it
Tiny Linux...pretty much pick any word that means small, append Linux, and you'll probably find a distro
Also there is something called LinuxTiny that I started reading about and planned on looking into after trying out some earlier things on my list

Core linux is a cut down version that I was planning on trying, but never got around to.

Then there are the small CD/USB distros: Puppy linux, DSL, etc

Also you may want to look into some of the older Slackware installs. I had the best luck with Slack-based distros (though my not-really-VGA-standard screen managed to defeat even these)

There are a bunch on Freshmeat. I know there is at least one that seemed to be a fairly small footprint that I wanted to try but can't remember the name for it (I'm at work). I think it was based around Slack 7-ish and was the basis of workshops in several cities...sorry, can't recall off the top of my head.

 

[GVN]

You will have to stick with an older version if you go with RedHat Linux. Version 7.x will work, but the newer versions, especially Fedora, require a minimum of 64 MB of RAM I believe. Just double check your specs before trying to load whatever you pick and you should be fine...

GVN

 

[thedaver]

Folks, for those of you who are being "tasked" with this in a business context, can you please take a moment to elaborate on the circumstances? I'm really curious on what happens in the thinking that leads to exploring these kinds of issues.... Appreciated!

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[spizotfl]

we are playing around with some smaller installs because we are a nonprofit without much of an it budget. we are taking a couple of old boxes and using them just for testing and learning purposes, but these old boxes aren't down with all the bells and whistles of full modern distros.

 

[sleipnir214]

My circumstance is a public school system.

We have ~25,000 students, 44 schools and ~6,000 computers running everything from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2003. In fact, we had one typing lab we got upgraded last September that was running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on some ancient machines.

My CIO (a statistics major with delusions of geekdom) has a bad habit of paying too much attention to the expensive solutions vendors give him. I'm looking for options that don't sound like the financing of the National Debt -- if I can't reuse some of our older W95 machines running Linux on them, I'm going to try turning them into think clients for Linux Terminal Service Project servers.

Want the best answers? Ask the best questions!

TANSTAAFL!!

 

[Tarwn]

Sorry, the distro I was trying to think of earlier was DeLi linux. Since sleipner got me thinking about it I may try installing again. I have tried newer versions of slackware that worked fine, the only issue in my case is thatI spent a few days arguing with X before giving up on getting it to display correctly.

 

[xwb]

It is certainly possible - I have Linux running on a 133MHz 32Mb machine laptop. Works quite well except compilation speeds are a bit slow and it freezes every so often when it is garbage collecting.

I'm have one machine on RedHat 9.0 and another on Corel Linux, both of which are quite old. I don't know about the current distributions.

On Corel, you need to create a swap partition first but it doesn't tell you that: it just doesn't get beyond the loading screen. I was going to bin it but then after I'd wiped RedHat , I thought I'd give it a try and it worked. The only difference was that I hadn't wiped the swap.

 

[AP81]

Vector Linux - have got it running on a P100 with 32MB RAM running Fluxbox as a window manager.


------------------------------------
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
------------------------------------