Re: [school-discuss] Knoppix vs. Freeduc vs. ???

[Richard Smedley <richard.smedley@livepublishing.co.uk>]

On Fri, 2003-06-06 at 00:52, Jan Wilson wrote:
> * Dave Prentice <prentice@instruction.com> [030605 16:58]:

> >     What's happened since then? It seems like every Linux distro has
> > become as much of a resource hog as Windows. Now they all want at
> > least 128 meg of RAM and 2 gig hard drive space. I still have old
> > machines that use SIMMs. It's a stretch to try to get them up to 64meg
> > of RAM, let alone buying bigger hard drives.

> I would agree with you that the production, mainstream Linux
> distributions have moved away from that "runs on older hardware"
> advantage, in favor of more graphical capabilities, more daemons
> running, etc.  I'm not sure that's so bad, though.

The great thing about Free Software is *choice*
Mandrake, SuSE and Red Hat are going after users
who have only ever known Wintel computing. However
the same kernel and toolchain are found in the 
already mentioned Vector, and Peanut Linux.

However the best-supported mainstream distro for your
older hardware is Debian GNU/Linux. The installer
should work on a machine with 8MB RAM, and 12
or 16MB should enable you to run a GUI such as
Fluxbox. Your older pentiums with 32MB RAM can become 
fully-functional desktops, using Abiword and Dillo,
but still benefit from the latest kernels and security 
updates :-)

 - Richard

-- 
Richard Smedley

LinuxUser & Developer
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http://www.linuxuserexpo.com/
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