Re: small Linux with X?

Moe Trin wrote:
On Fri, 10 Mar 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.linux, in article
<44116268$0$25074$1e6826b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Bruce Coryell wrote:

Roy Schestowitz wrote:

__/ [ hack_tick ] on Friday 10 March 2006 06:44 \__

I am looking for some good Linux distro, with support for X-Desktop
environment
the target system is an old Intel-P2 with 32Mb Ram


The P2 is fine - 32Megs with KDE??? I don't think that's enough for the
splash page on boot - never mind trying to log in.


Have a look at the list:

http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Mini_Distributions/


Good answer.


Keep in mind that, historically, one of the things Linux was touted for
is that it didn't need the heavy hardware requirements of of MS
operating systems.


Linux doesn't need all of the heavy hardware.


Lately, with advent of large footprint Red Hat, Mandriva, and Debian
distros (and their clones and derivatives), Linux has been moving away

from that.

Much of that is the insanely bloated eye-candy that distributors are
adding to attract the windoze user. There used to be (and still is)
a lot of fun poked at 'emacs' which was originally defined as "Eight
Megs And Constantly Swapping" (later "Eighty Megs..." and likely soon
to be "Eight-hundred Megs..."), such as the snide remarks of

---------------------
"Emacs is a great OS. The only thing it lacks is a decent editor."
---------------------
It's actually Emacs that is the OS and GNU/Linux the device-driver.
---------------------
Actually I tried Emacs, but it kept asking for my credit card details to
buy a better computer to run on.
---------------------
Computers tend to come with at least 512Mb RAM these days. Half for X,
half for emacs, what's the problem?
---------------------
"Thanks to the joint efforts of OpenOffice, Mozilla, and a few others, Emacs
officially entered the category of lightweight utilities." -- kalifa on /.
---------------------

That last one is quite telling. A lot depends on what you are trying to
do, and how much eye-candy you need. My firewall box (the remains of a
386SX-16 laptop - without keyboard, display, or case) runs just fine
with only 8 Megs of RAM and an 8 Meg swap partition which is rarely
used. My wife's workstation uses swap, despite 2 Gigs of RAM, while this
box has 64 Megs and is using less than a Meg of swap.

Old guy

Well, here's my small Linux requirement: I have a couple of old 486 systems lying around, so old they both need to have their motherboard batteries replaced before they can be used. Both of these ran MS-DOS 6.2/ Win 3.1 in their day, one also ran the first version of Win95. I would love to convert these to Linux, with just a little eye candy (about equivalent to Win 3.1) along with some bare bones word processing, games, email, spread***, etc. capabilities. I would need a version of Linux that can live on a 500 MB hard drive, with 8 - 16 MB of RAM, with a 66 MHz processor. Win 3.1 had graphics eye candy, but it was only 16-bit - something equivalent to a 32-bit version of that would be a good benchmark to shoot for.
.