Re: [school-discuss] Distros For Old PCs

[Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 11:16:25AM -0700, Joel Kahn wrote:
> I add a vote for Damn Small Linux.  I've been experimenting
> with it from a LiveCD booted on my WinXP machine. The distro
> seems to offer fast response and good tight usage of RAM &
> other resources. It does not come bundled with a whole slew of
> apps, of course, but it ought to be a solid foundation to build
> on.

Just in case one would actually need apps -- ALT Linux 4.0
contains some optimizations for RAM usage (for those interested:
linking with -Wl,--as-needed by default); I checked the installer
and KDE3 desktop on PIII-500/64M, installed just fine and KDE
alone ran OK (that is, with konqueror, but without openoffice):

http://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/distributions/ALTLinux/4.0/Desktop/4.0.3/iso/
 ftp://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/distributions/ALTLinux/4.0/Desktop/4.0.3/iso/
(en/ru/uk images differ only in default gfxboot language)

On a similar note -- I'm working on releasing terminal server
distribution with ALTSP5 technology out-of-box, so far it's
4.0RC2 which would happily run on Pentium 133/32M and brings up
an i586 diskless thin client with 16M RAM either:

http://ftp.linux.kiev.ua/pub/Linux/ALT/beta/ltsp-server/
 ftp://ftp.linux.kiev.ua/pub/Linux/ALT/beta/ltsp-server/

As a matter of fact, 23 KDE+Firefox sessions would eat up some
1100M RAM (1200 with one more openoffice).

BTW it's base of Linux Terminal distribution involved in Russian
school pilot project.

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/