Linux flavour for 9 year old laptop?

[Ypnos]

Morning all

I'm wondering what version of Linux people would recommend for a 9 year old laptop. Its only use will be web browsing.

Apparently its processor is a Transmeta crusoe.... (I've never heard of it either)

Thanks

[directhex]

Oh my, that's a bit... low end

We're talking performance equivalent to between a 166MHz and 350MHz P3

You may need something like Puppy, depending on how much RAM you have

[Ypnos]

128MB RAM apparently lol

I'm going to try out Lubuntu, but I'm not hopeful :O

[TheAnimus]

I'm thinking something like DSL perhaps?

odds are the HDD is going to be slow as, so not using it might be an idea! If they are nine, giving them a kiosk style experiance might also be no bad thing.

[Funkstar]

Don't be so quick to jump on the linux bandwagon, it is bloated after all

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/0...nux-Is-Bloated

[snootyjim]

Surely you could get a free laptop with better specs than that?

[malfunction]

I appreciate cash may be limited but you may end up wishing you'd bought a 2nd hand / refurb laptop for all the fun you're going to have with that

[Funkstar]

Apparently its processor is a Transmeta crusoe.... (I've never heard of it either)

What kind of laptop is that?

A friend of mine had a tiny little Sony thing with a Crusoe, that would be about 9 years old now too. No idea if he still has it. It ended up with Red Hat and a Kilix development suite on it, but he was working at Borland at the time.

This was probably the first ever Netbook, way before anyone thought about them.

[Ypnos]

It's a Fujitsu Siemens P2020 Lifebook. I didn't buy it, I'm not crazy! lol
it's for a friend. I got LUbuntu Live on it, but when I double click the installer icon, nothing happens...

Edit: was using the wrong ISO, bah!

[scaryjim]

Hmmm, review here. That's an amazing piece of kit - and I thought I had some odd hardware lying around.

Frankly, assuming it's mostly for web browsing, I reckon your friend would be better off investing in the cheapest 10" netbook they can find, but each to their own, I guess...

Love to know how it runs though...

[mycarsavw]

I have Puppy running on one of these beauties. It boots up, automatically logs in and runs a script which starts a photo slideshow application.

Best free-ninety-nine I ever spent.

[s3ds]

I used to use xubuntu on a tecra 8000 ( p2 300 ) with 128mb ram ver 7 i think

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu

[peterb]

Linux distros, like other operating systems, have moved on to take advantage of improvements in hardware specification, although unlike some other OS's it is more modular in approach - so it is eawsier to install a stripped down version.

One option would be to try to get hold of a Linux distro from that era, something like Red Hat 7 or Red Hat 9 (9 was a bit later IIRC) but while you might get the basic OS, support and upgrades will be very difficult to get.

Another option is to use a mainstream distro, but install the minimum components to get it working. One of the most intensive aspects is the GUI, so while you might get away with one of teh basic guis, you would get very disappointing results from Gnome or KDE, so really yopu are looking at something that would work best with the CLI. That doesn't peclude it from acting as a (say) a web server or even a local mail server, but not for much else.

That said, I'm running Fedora 10 on a seven year old laptop without any problems at all, although I have added more memory to it, and it is pentium based, so you might be pleasantly surprised.

You could try one of the small distros that have allready been pared down - as others have mentioned, Puppy Linux or DSL are worth a look. But until you take the plunge and try it, you won't really know! However since they don't cost anything apart from a bit of time downloading, you can experiment a bit!

[directhex]

FWIW, Linus used to work for Transmeta

[abaxas]

Roll your own optimised distro with Gentoo?

Might take weeks to install, but will be the fastest option.

[Ypnos]

Well I tried LUbuntu and it ran like a bag of spanners! Decided to give Win2k the nLite treatment and cut it down to bare minimum and it was a great decision if I may say so mysel!


(sorry, had a couple of beers)

thank you goodNight!