Re: Choosing Linux distro for Compaq Presario 1200

On Sun, 29 Oct 2006 06:24:39 -0800, s.dondelinger wrote:

Just for kicks, I purchased a Compaq Presario 1200 at a garage sale for
$20. It's 500 mhz AMD processor and 64 meg's are sportin' a 5 year old
version of Windows 98. I thought this might be a good candidate for
trying a Linux distro instead of becoming a vintage windows OS
enthusiast. Any sugestions? My goal is to upgrade the modem for wi-fi,
cut my teeth on Linux, tune it for all the bare-bones necesities with
an emphasis on text and security, and of course, boast of my frugality.

Just about any Linux distro (in text mode) will run on that machine.
However, the real question is which GUI will? Unless you can upgrade to
at least 256MB of RAM, KDE and GNOME are out from a practical use
standpoint. I have a Dell Inspiron 5000e, 500 MHZ PIII, 256MB RAM, Knoppix
4.1, and KDE runs just fine on it. Not lightning fast, but very usable.
However, on my 900MHZ Duron desktop with 512MB RAM, Fedora Core 4 and
GNOME, some apps (not all) are sluggish.

For a mint condition Thinkpad 240X I just acquired (500MHz PIII and
192MB), I'm considering ArchLinux and either XFCE4 (www.xfce.org) or
OpenBox (http://icculus.org/openbox/about.php)for the GUI. Both are
full-featured, lightweight GUI environments designed for
resource-challenged systems, while still being 100% compatible with KDE
and GNOME apps and utilities, if you want to run any.

I suggest you examine the following distros, listed in no particular order:

Vector Linux (www.vectorlinux.com)
Arch Linux (www.archlinux.org)
Slackware (www.slackware.com)
Debian (www.debian.org)

There are other distros that are designed to be less resource hungry, but
I don't have any personal experience with them. So, I'm not going to list
any.

Stef

.

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