Any good, lightweight linux distro for lappy[With Wi-Fi)

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Picked up an old laptop from somebody who apparently got scammed off EBay. Apparently the seller said it was a 1.5Ghz Mobile P4 w/ 384MB Memory and a 30 GB Hard Drive. This is what it really was.

Brand Name/Model- Dell Latitude CPi
Memory-128MB EDO Memory
Processor-300Mhz Mobile PII
Hard Drive-6.4 GB
Operating System- Windows XP [I installed Windows ME unstead.]

I don't like Dell but their old buisness laptops were really sturdy and top of the line.

I would like to know what are any good distros that are just about as good as Ubuntu and will fully support my hardware including my 2Wire WiFi card

Ouch. 128 MB of RAM won't get you very far. You said you like Ubuntu, maybe Xubuntu would be a good choice? But don't actually install Xubuntu- do the Ubuntu-minimal install and then add XFCE. It's lighter that way. In case Xubuntu is still too bloated, there's always stuff like fluxbuntu, damnsmalllinux, puppy linux, icebuntu, etc. Arch is also lightweight, and (I've been told) very fast.

Well i could upgrade to 256MB but that will cost $120 do to the fact that EDO Memory isn't made anymore. If ihe lappy came out 6 monthes later it will take PC133 SDRam and i could have the thing running with 512MB of memory.[I have a lot of SD and DDR Ram.]

$120 will probably buy you that laptop on eBay, wouldn't it? I'm sure you can still run Linux just fine with 128MB RAM if you're careful about how you set it up. Try http://computingminimalists.blogspot.com/ and http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=575456

I'm probably not the best source for linux advice. But Zenwalk says it'll run on 128megs of ram.

"Hardware Requirements

Zenwalk GNU/Linux is optimized for the i686 instruction set, but backward compatible with i486. These are the minimal hardware requirements to run Zenwalk in Xwindow mode, with correct performance (some lower configs work - ie : PII - , but might be slow) :

* Pentium III class processor
* 128 Mb RAM
* 2Gb HDD"


I've only played around a bit with it, but it might be what you're after.

I'm running Slackware on a 96Mbyte (upgraded to max from its original 32Mbyte!) Compaq Armada 4220T. (Pentium MMX - 266 MHz)

I used to run Debian and before that, SuSE, on it.

Just for fun, I haven't booted it up for ages (the power supply died, then the battery died), and it seems to need a bit of work . LILO manages an "L" followed by lots of "99"s. Ah... that's because I seem to have messed up the MBR at some point. SBM to the rescue. hda7 has gone 227 days without a check... hda3 too... 11 minutes into my messing about, and KDE 3.4 is now up and running.

All that, just so I could verify that it only has a 4Gbyte drive.

(And, incidentally, to cure the MBR problem. Now just 3 minutes to KDE up and running.)

(And now... I guess it's time to update the silly machine...)

(and the other one... the Toshiba T2130CS (Intel 486DX4 75MHz) which has TinyLinux on it, but I haven't got X on it. 8Mbytes RAM, 500Mbyte HDD, no CD, just a floppy drive, and a PCMCIA slot I haven't tried, yet, )

Last edited by lau on 30 Aug 2008, 7:44 am, edited 1 time in total.

The guy I got it from paid $200 for it a few monthes back. It was going to his kid but itw was so slow on XP that he couldn't even web surf or play runescape. So now its mine because I have a use for it.

Puppy linux. would almost certainly run on it.

Link to info on Puppy linux

L.

Damn Small linux, Puppy linux and maybe Xubuntu would run on it.

Damnsmall runs sufficiently well (including wifi) on my craptop with 36 MB of RAM, so I guess it wouldn't complain about 128 MB

You sure have come a long way in your knowledge Orwell.

I'd recommend the same, then go into services and kill everything that you done use; go into processes and kill most of the duplicates there. I managed to idle Xubuntu at 140 megs of ram and I didnt even start with minimal Ubuntu. I was running from a 2 gig thumb drive using a proper install, rather than a squashed file system.

However, I wouldnt recommend that most people kill the duplicate processes. For practical operations I still had firefox w/flash and gimp.

Xubuntu won't run very well on it, but from what I've read puppy linux or DSL will work well on it

Pick a distro and gut it. Low memory WMs like the boxes/FVWM would be good. IME w/ 128mb of ram the browser should either be lightweight like dillo or use the webkit engine for acceptable performance. Check this out too.

Debian is simply the best, according to my taste.

I have been using it since -99 and I strongly recommend it! Of course it's a matter of taste which one people prefers. Debian has definitely not been one of the most easiest distributions to install, but it has improved a lot.

With Debian Etch you have a graphical installer for the first time, actually. Better late than never.

Debian Lenny is expected to be released sometime this year.

Puppy linux is good.

I'm just trying out Puppy4 on my somewhat cruddy laptop. Seems excellent - given that it installed itself quite happily from the 80Mbyte live CD.

It detected my horrible ESS sound and NEARLY got my nightmare PCMCIA ethernet card. (It has to be told to do only 10, not 100, as it gets a 99% error rate at 100. Still, I can force that from the other end.)

It's currently happily living in 240Mbytes of HDD and says it's using 50 of my 96 Mbytes of RAM.

It comes with Seamonkey, which I use anyway. I've yet to explore the rest of its stuff.