OT - which distro?

dogscoff · #1 June 29th, 2007, 07:41 AM

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?

Fyron · #2 June 29th, 2007, 01:56 PM

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.

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.

Open Office is in everything too, though I dunno how it would run on the laptop.

Baron Munchausen · #3 June 29th, 2007, 04:11 PM

Wow, and I thought I was 'pushing it' by installing Linux on a 400Mhz K6-2 with 256 MB of RAM...

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.

Fyron · #4 June 29th, 2007, 10:37 PM

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.

Spoo · #5 June 30th, 2007, 07:40 PM

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

tp555 · #6 July 1st, 2007, 08:21 AM

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.

dogscoff · #7 July 2nd, 2007, 06:39 AM

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=-)

dogscoff · #8 August 23rd, 2007, 08:50 AM

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.

Fyron · #9 August 23rd, 2007, 03:20 PM

SE5 runs fine on Vista.

Baron Munchausen · #10 August 24th, 2007, 03:18 PM

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.