OT - which distro?
 

Been looking into Linux lately, and I have to say the choice of distros is pretty bewildering. Many of them have prohibitively high system requirements, others try o hard to be compact that they lose functionality or ease-of-use. I'm looking for something in the middle.

My first actual Linux install wil be to my otherwise defunct Toshiba laptop. I don't want to format my main PC just yet, not until I've had a chance to play.

Anyway, the PC in question is a Toshiba 470CDT. It has 32 meg ram, a 1st-generation pentium (a P166, I think) and about 2 gig HD. It ran Office and email and a web browser comfortably on Win98, so there ought to be a Linux out there somewhere that will offer similar functionality: Ie, open office or similar, firefox, thunderbird, all from a proper GUI (can't be doing with text-only stuff, sorry.)

I'd like a distro that lets me learn about Linux, but at the same time I need something that will pick up all of the important hardware automatically. I want to climb in the shallow end, not jump in ddep=-)

Distros I've looked into:
Ubuntu: System requirements way too high. Forget it.

Puppy Linux: Looks like fun, but it wants to run entirely out of a ram-disk, and for that it requires 128meg mem. There is an option to install to HD, which presumably reduces the memory requirements, but I can't see anywhere what that reduction would be. Anyone got experience with this?

Damn Small Linux. Looks nice, and I've played with the Live CD. However I still get the feeling that compromises are being made to cram it all into 50 meg. I don't mind if the installed OS takes up a few hundred meg of HD space, I'd rather have the full functionality that my machine can handle.

BasicLinux: Designed to run on machines even older than mine, and fits into about 3meg. Ridiculously small and it has to be severely limited as a result, but I applaud the effort, and thought it might be fun to play with.

Anyone recommend any others? Maybe I need to be looking at older versions of current distros. Anyone able to give me a clue? Am I barking up the wrong tree looking at LiveCD distros?

Oh, and while I'm here, another question: How easy is it to install new software to a distro? Most of them have a list of apps that come with the distro, but if I wanted to add, say, openoffice or wesnoth or slashem, is it a straightforward process? Will such programs work on some distros but not others or are they likely to run on any Linux?

Re: OT - which distro?
 

Live CDs might be a little dicey on a Pentium I with only 32 MB ram (dicey or impossible). But you can certainly try the Live CD installers for, say, Ubuntu on your desktop to try them out there.

Try Xubuntu. It is Ubuntu with XFCE window manager, rather than Gnome, and a few other lighter weight packages as default. You get all the benefits of a Debian-based distro, in a lightweight flavor. They should have a Live CD installer, so try it on your desktop to see if you like it.

You could also just install a minimal Ubuntu and choose other lightweight DE/WMs. Noone says you have to use Gnome with Ubuntu. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

For application installations, the best bet is a Debian-based distribution. Apt is by far the best package management solution, in no small part thanks to the massive repositories Debian (and others, like Ubuntu) maintain. Redhat's RPM is a failure due to lack of a good central repository, IMO...

Any application should run on any distro of linux; if they don't provide an Apt package (or RPM for Redhat, or a Suse package), you will likely have to compile from source. Its usually not too difficult, but it can be intimidating at first.

Wesnoth at least seems to have binaries in the Ubuntu and Debian repositories, so it will be a snap. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif Open Office is in everything too, though I dunno how it would run on the laptop.

Re: OT - which distro?
 

Wow, and I thought I was 'pushing it' by installing Linux on a 400Mhz K6-2 with 256 MB of RAM... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

You seem to have already discovered the smallest and lightest distros available. The main reason for the increasing system requirements of all OSes is the fancy graphical interfaces, btw, so consider if you can't do what you need/want to do running in command line ("text") mode. There is a browser called Lynx that runs without a graphical desktop. Plenty of text mode editors are available for Linux, too.

Re: OT - which distro?
 

Minimal Debian/Ubuntu with Openbox for a WM is quite snappy on old hardware, and maintains the "ease of use" of Debian/Ubuntu (unlike a number of the "minimalist" distros that are definitely made with a hacker mentality...). CLI only is not very useful for a non-server box. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: OT - which distro?
 

I don't think you can install Ubuntu with only 32 MB of RAM.

Re: OT - which distro?
 

I'd go with puppy linux.I have used it.When you exit you can save your config in a single file,256 or 512 mb.With 32 mb of ram its gonna be slow.Installing puppy to hd would help but you have to repartition or totally wipe hd and install as the only os.What you need is more ram,but that could be more of a problem to deal with.

Re: OT - which distro?
 

Thanks for the advice. I will definitely look into that lightweight Ubuntu Fyron mentioned. It will be either that or DSL that goes onto my old toshiba P1/32 meg laptop. Puppy looks nice but I'm not sure it will run happily on such a low-spec machine, even installed to HD (reformatting the drive is not an issue: I have no reason to keep Windoze on this machine.)

My current laptop (Sony p3 1400/ 128meg) will eventually go with whatever distro ends up on the Tosh. Easier to maintain them both if they are the same. The Viao ran the DSL live CD beautifully. Unfortunately I can't just go ahead and install on that one straight away because the wife uses it a lot and she will resent the transition to something new and different. Therefore I am not putting a new OS in front of her until I've ironed out any teething problems and am in a position to answer all her queries immediately. Dual boot would be a good compromise, except I don't really have the HD space free for it.

However, if I can re-house her onto the little Tosh or a refurbed Dell she might be getting soon, so that we each have a PC of our own, then I can do whatever I like to the Sony=-)

I used to use Lynx way back in the day at uni, and even now I consider PINE the best damn email client I've ever used, so I'm not afraid of CLI-only apps and systems. However I wouldn't have much use for a non-GUI machine.
Maybe I'm just a spoiled Windows-generation brat, but I want an environment that is nice to look at as well as functional, that displays graphics and video, and I rather like the idea of controlling things by point-and-click rather than memorising and typing in countless commands and their parameters. There's a reason the world moved to WIMP-systems.

Besides, in my mind whatever Linux I install should look at least as advanced as the Windows it replaces (except for special cases like servers, where a CLI would probably do just fine), or there's no point. To go from win98 to a CLI-only environment would feel as though installing Linux is a step backwards, not forwards.

In other news, I will get a good chance to play with Linux installation this week. Yesterday I lent my Ubuntu live CD to my Dad for him to play with and (thanks largely to all the beers he'd just had the pub=-) he managed to click the "install Ubunutu" button, repartition his hard drive and wipe Windows off altogether. He now has a beautifully running Ubuntu laptop (An Evesham.co.uk Quest something or other- REALLY nice machine), but he's lost his Outlook email history and address book, and probably a load of other data as well. Luckily his most important stuff *was* backed up.

So now I have to try to recover whatever lost data I can (anyone recommend a good file recovery proggy for Ubuntu?) and put Windows XP back on for him. I'll be installing Ubuntu as a dual-boot option=-)

Re: OT - which distro?
 

Just an update for anyone who cares:

My house is now Windows-free[1]! Yay me!

My wife did get a refurbed Dell for her birthday, a 510m, which is running Ubuntu very nicely indeed, thankyou very much. She *****es about it from time to time because it's not what she's used to, but that seems to be diminishing as time goes on. I think she quite likes it really, but just won't admit it=-)

That meant I was free to do whatever I liked to the Viao, which in the end was an install of Xubuntu (this machine isn't quite up to spec for full Ubuntu, imho). I'm really liking Xubuntu, maybe even more than the full thing. Anyway, it runs thunderbird and firefox and wesnoth, so I'm happy=-)

[1] Actually, not quite: The knackered old Toshiba is still in a box in the attic with Win98 installed. I'm tempted to dig it out and put Damn Small Linux just to get rid of this footnote, but the truth is I don't think I can be bothered.

And how will I run Space Empires? Well, I have this rather shiny Dell desktop running XP on my desk at work, and I'm allowed to play games in my lunch hour=-) Does SE5 run on Vista? Maybe we should be bugging Aaron to work on a Linux version rather than maiking it Vista-happy. After all, the Linux gaming scene is considerably smaller than the Windows one, so a high-quality commercial game like SE5 arriving on the platform might get a bit more attention than for Windows, and cause a bit more of a stir. Especially now he's gotten most of the killer bugs out of it.

My next project: Buy a knackered laptop from ebay and cannibalise it to fix the broken hinge on my Vaio. And maybe put a bigger hard drive in there while I've got it in pieces.

Oh, and learn programming. I'm thinking Python.

Re: OT - which distro?
 

SE5 runs fine on Vista.

Re: OT - which distro?
 

So please detail the specs of the machines and which distros are running on them. I'm curious what you found most workable for each level of hardware. Does DSL come with usable office software (more than just a bare text editor) and does it have dialup capability? I have an old socket 7 (original Pentium) machine with an internal modem (no network) and 256 MB of RAM and have been testing larger distros on it. They are very slow to install. But I want reasonably complete features. So I haven't tried DSL or Puppy Linux yet.

Re: OT - which distro?
 

Baron, I will eventually be posting a webpage detailing exactly what I did and how, so that other potential Linux users with similar hardware can see what's possible. The link will be http://www.dogscoff.co.uk/linux but I don't have anything up there just yet.

In the end I went for Full Ubuntu 7.04 on the Dell Inspiron 510m (just google for specs). It installed fine, picked up all the hardware, no further tweaking required whatsoever. It even runs the desktop effects nicely.

The machine that's making things interesting is a battered-but-functioning Sony Vaio fx701. Specs here. It's a good little machine, designed to run WinXP home which it did, well enough, for some five or six years.

Anyway, I installed Xubuntu on the Sony from the alternate install CD. Full Ubuntu was just too much for it. Xubuntu's install picked up all the hardware without any hassle at all, including the Sitecom WN PCC 01 wireless network card in the PCMCIA slot, so I was online straight away. I've removed abiword and installed openoffice and everything seems to run just fine. Admittedly, all I've used it for so far is browsing, viewing photos, checking email and playing Wesnoth. However the hardware seems to be entirely up to the job. Oh, I also had a quick play with LinCity, which seemed to be a little bit laggy, but I have a suspicion it runs like that on most computers.

There have been a few niggling things to sort out, some of them my own fault, I'm sure (keyboard mappings, transferring emails, that kind of stuff) which will be documented in full on my website.

I haven't played with Puppy or DSL yet, I'm afraid. They both seem to offer day-to-day use desktop systems though. Take a look at their websites for screenshots and software lists:

http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=1 (hit 'refresh' if it comes up with "page not found."

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

I'm tempted to spend £10 on a USB memory stick and put Puppy on there, just so I can play with it. If I do, I will report back. I don't think I'll be using DSL unless I do one day decide to unmothball my old Toshiba.

Is your machine home-built/custom built or is factory built? What exactly are the specs?

Re: OT - which distro?
 

Oh, it's definitely a homebrew. I replaced the contents of an old 386 "baby AT" case with parts that I bought on eBay. It's an Asus T2P4 motherboard, one of the most highly regarded boards of that generation. The level 2 cache was still on the motherboard at that time, and normally a Pentium MMX 233 would be the fastest CPU for this board. BUT... AMD produced the compatible K6-2 series with a special multiplier so you could get 6X with the 2X jumper settings. This gives me what is essentially a Pentium II system at 400 Mhz, but still with only 256 MB of ordinary DRAM (only the level 2 cache is SDRAM). Thanks to the long-unchanged standard for IDE it's got a relatively modern 15 Gb HD attached. And a Matrox G200 video card which is quite fast at 2D display just waaaay behind the 3D revolution. Currently I've got Fedora 6 running XFCE on it, which is serviceable but often slow. Unfortunately, Fedora 7 is not available on CD anymore, only DVD. I'm not buying a DVD drive for this ancient system, even if it might work. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif So I'm thinking about what other distros to use to keep it relatively up-to-date. Xubuntu sounds like a good candidate but the full CD image is a bit much to download -- it'll have to be mailorder for that. I also downloaded Puppy Linux 2.17.1 via bittorrent (only 100 MB) and plan to try it out soon.

Re: OT - which distro?
 

OIC.

How big is this killer Fedora7 download? Couldn't you order the DVD, get a friend with a more modern machine to transfer the installer from DVD to a huge USB flash drive or external hard drive? Might set you back a few $$$ for a stick that size or a hard dive, but it would be something you could get good use out of afterwards, even when you get a new PC.

Alternately, would it be possible to take your PC to a friend's house/ local friendly PC shop and transfer the DVD across a network?

I'd be happy to nip round with my laptop so we could transfer the files by ethernet. Just supply the return flight tickets to Ohio and I'll be right over=-)

Re: OT - which distro?
 

I haven't even bothered to look at how big Fedora 7 is. A single CD is a huge problem to download when you're on dialup. A DVD is unthinkable. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif As far as I know, all of the major distros do have 'network' install capabilities. So I suppose I could put a cheap network car in this machine and possibly install from another machine with a DVD drive. Even that might be more trouble than it's worth. Puppy Linux might be just the thing to make this machine usable for a few more years as a 'backup'. Every thing I currently own is quickly becoming obsolete as the PCI-X bus and multi-core CPUs spread. Looks like it'll be time to buy a new multi-core machine soon. Then I can run SUSE with its default multi-processor enabled kernel. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif