Best Linux Distro - Low end machine

SouperComputer

Hi Guys,

I have a machine as follows:

P1 233MMX
96Mb RAM
Rage II onboard
4Gb HD

I wanna put a GUI linux on this mahine, whats the most suitable one? ive run some more recent Red hat's and Mandrakes on faster machine and found it runs like treakle

i have a copy of turbolinx lying about, would this be the way to go?

also, what GUI is best for my setup? Enlighenment, KDE etc etc.

TIA

Red Alert

GUI's just take up a hell of a lot of processor usage. You might be better off just using a window manager and the X-Window system if you don't mind doing alot of your setup and control through terminal windows.

Gavin

Fluxbox is quite a light weight window manager.

There are distributions out there specificly to take up a small footprint, and run on older machines. Have a look at www.linux.org for a decent list.

Other than that, just make sure you turn off eveything you don't need in the way of daemons and run as light a windowmanager as you can. fluxbox as I say or blackbox. If you don't care about appearance twm would be fairly light !

Gav

Typedef

On a similar machine I run Gentoo and fluxbox.

<Advice> X Windows + Browser will eat ram, you need more if you want to run both else your machine will start using swapspace and that is bad. </Advice>

SouperComputer

thanks for the help guys. Ill try those out. Spotted peanutlinux, seems good too.

ill try em all while I can (got DSL )

Kai

Originally posted by Red Alert
GUI's just take up a hell of a lot of processor usage. You might be better off just using a window manager and the X-Window system if you don't mind doing alot of your setup and control through terminal windows.

I thought that KDE and Gnome were GUI's that use X-window systems in much the same way as say blackbox or icewm only they are different applications? Is there another way of running Linux Gui without X ??
i have Redhat 8 and im new to linux.

Gavin

Originally posted by Frugu
I thought that KDE and Gnome were GUI's that use X-window systems in much the same way as say blackbox or icewm only they are different applications? Is there another way of running Linux Gui without X ??
i have Redhat 8 and im new to linux.

Yeah you are right. KDE, GNOME, fluxbox etc, any window manager runs on top of X. The XWindow system is the only gui system for linux, discounting ncurses, svgalib or other console based systems.

The XServer just sites there and draws what it is told to draw. The windowmanger create all the nice widget's and controls etc to make things looks nice for you.

Gav

spartic

What??

What ye's talkin about 96mb RAM 233mhz processor enough H/D space you got a machine that'll run linux get yourself an older version of Linux install everything you want GUI etc kas it should run fine i run an old version of Red Hat on one of my machines think it 6.2 but all i am running that on is a

486
48mb RAM
10GB H/D

nosmo

I'd recommend blackbox or pwm. I use them on an alternating basis over Mandrake 8.1 on a p150,48m ram,1.6gig hd laptop, and have few problems

leeroybrown

I'd say use Fluxbox. It's a pretty nice minimalist window-manager. (It's based on Blackbox but has a few extra frills)