prehistoric laptop - which linux?

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you should be fine running X and a lightweight GUI, just be very careful what apps you choose to run, something like firefox would bring it to a crawl for sure

by itself, just running X and something like fluxbox or blackbox and your looking at needing about 40Mb or RAM, that would put you well into using the swap space at all times, its doable, but it wont be fast at all, text mode apps it would do quite well and if properly setup barely use the swap space much

some other things you can do, trim the TTY's down to like 1 or 2

keep services to a minimum even if they dont use CPU cycles when dormant they do use cache space

stay away from java anything

stay away from python anything if you can avoid it

compiled apps are good, interpreted code apps are bad, for example a browser like dillo will be quite fast, firefox or mozilla wont be at all and barely run
 
Hey, my friend just gave me an old Pentium 1 @133MHz, 64MB RAM PC with CDROM drive. I put in a hard drive and am trying to find a version of Linux for it, I put puppy linux on it, as well as DSL, but both ran fine on CD but won't boot from the hard drive. Puppy gets to Loading Grub stage 1.5 and then has an error 15. I then switched my hard drive from secondary to primary master to see if that fixes anything. The BIOS is AMIBIOS, if that makes a difference. Does anyone know how to make it run from HD?

Oh yes
something like firefox would bring it to a crawl for sure
I ran Firefox from the DSL live CD and SeaMonkey (looks pretty similar) from Puppy Linux live CD, both take a while to start up, but run pretty good. On puppy, it is a bit hard to make your Internet work over Ethernet network, but it is possible.
 
Ok, got Puppy running great on this PC. One thing: DON'T USE "SUPERFLOPPY" MODE!!!!! It kills your hard drive, and wipes the data. To restore it is sort of hard. Puppy runs fine on my system (same as the laptop you mentioned but with 64MB of RAM). Only problem is SeaMonkey (which I am using now) is sort of slow but not unusable. AbiWord runs fine on this PC. I can't test multimedia because I have no sound card in this PC. Overall, Puppy, in my opinion, is a better OS than DSL.
 
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