Linux for an old laptop

[UltraMagnus]

the delays in vista just show that a single entity no longer has the ability to create a decent modern OS or maintain it...

[peterb]

multitasking in linux is probably one of its major pitfalls.

.......

Linux's biggest let down is how badly designed the kernel.

Maybe, but my Linux machine has now been running 24x7 for 2 months, running Apache, Mysql, browser and several other desktop apps under Gnome, and while a desktop app may occasionally crash, it doesn't bring down the system. Meanwhile my laptop running Win2K has again decided to reboot itself without any assistance from me - as it does on a regular basis!

Now that is not necessarily a fair comparison - certainly not scientific, as the hardware is not identical, and there are many other variable in the equation, but in general, I have found that the other windows 2K system I run tend to be less reliable in terms of system freezes than the linux ones. The exception is when the Linux disks - running ext3 - gets to about 95% useage when it really slows down and does start to cause problems.

Maybe the windows systems aren't optimised (certainly the linux one isn't) but it is much simpler diagnosing problems in Linux where many operations are plain language script based, than delving round the Windows registry.

[Spud1]

No one has mentioned Slackware yet?

Get an old version of slackware..3.xx - it's tiny, can come in floppy disc versions if you have no cd drive (about 60 of em mind, reminds me of windows 95 lol), or a CD or network bootable version. (check the mirror FTP sites for old versions, main site only has 10.x which I doubt will run nicely)

I successfully got it installed on a 486DX laptop with only 16meg of ram - ran perfectly in CLI mode - although obviously without X.

I'm sure you could put an older version of X on there too, and run a low-resource system like FVWM? (http://www.fvwm.org/)

Would do you for web browsing and email i'm sure of it, although does require some linux knowledge to get it all working as you will have to deal with most packages manaually..not too difficult though and google is your best friend