Re: [school-discuss] linux distributions for low resource computers

[Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jun 02, 2008 at 12:43:15AM -0400, Andy Figueroa wrote:
> On the 486 with 20 megs of RAM, no GUI has proven satisfactory in any way.

I've been working on 486/16 (XFree86 3.3.6 -- one should pay
attention to use any card with a specific server, not more
RAM-hungry generic SVGA back then) using icewm and gimp quite
effectively.

Probably looking for something timed at 2001 or so might do the
trick... so far I still keep this one just in case:
ftp://ftp.linux.kiev.ua/pub/Linux/ALT/ISO/historic/Junior-1.1.iso

There should be Black Cat Linux 6.02 somewhere around but my CD
archive has only SRPMS disk by now.  (that was a polished RH6
clone)

> The Libretto with 32 megs of RAM provides a working GUI to
> which I've installed Red Had up through version 6 running older
> KDE desktops (not very well)

KDE 1.1.2 should work, 1.0beta should be better yet (they somehow
managed to introduce a breakthrough in memory consumption between
1.0beta and 1.0 -- that is, beta was bettar).

Would stick with icewm firmly though. :)

> On the 128 meg machines in the computer labs (these are fat
> clients where the OS and all the software reside on the
> clients, but the student's logins and files all reside on the
> server, a Celeron 366 w/256 megs of RAM) - they have been
> satisfactory on the Slackware/Zenwalk (XFCE desktop) from a
> couple of years ago and pretty much run everything at a
> reasonable, but poky speed.

Using these as terminals with something like Athlon64 X2/2Gb
(which is dirt cheap these days) might result in quite less poky
speed ;-)  I'd even try to trade half the memory and hard drives
in for PXE-bootable network cards if that would be possible.

> Something about your mileage varying ...

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