I think DSL pretty much is dead, if you need an moderately light linux distribution, that is not too hard to use, I would suggest Puppy Linux. It is based on Ubuntu and is pretty user friendly in my opinion. I have also been playing around with SliTaz linux sometimes, it seems to work well too.

Aideka wrote:

I think DSL pretty much is dead, if you need an moderately light linux distribution, that is not too hard to use, I would suggest Puppy Linux. It is based on Ubuntu and is pretty user friendly in my opinion. I have also been playing around with SliTaz linux sometimes, it seems to work well too.

It would be nice to try to get my old PCs back on the internet, since that is pretty much the only reason I need Linux for. I doubt if I will ever be an enthusiast. I can do everything else offline in Windows XP and earlier machine. Though I would rather install Puppy on my systems' hard drives rather than waste a precious optical drive bay to keep the OS CD in there all the time.

Tell you the truth I'd much rather go online with a 486 and do everything except Youtube and such. 😀

Puppy can be installed as far as I remember. I would say that DSL might not have that option, not sure about that. There are many lightweight Linux distros out there, so if you could tell what kind of hardware you would be installing it on, I would be able to offer more help, since I have been trying countless Linux distros over the years. Puppy is pretty usable in everything though.

I'm pretty much open to anything. Doesn’t have to be fancy, I would likely be dual booting an old version of Windows with it. I have a good amount of old hardware I like to make as useful as I can. I enjoy testing limits on older hardware. I have everything 486 to Athlon K7 as my retro computers.

I ran into Q4OS earlier. Claims to to be an XP replacement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TF-c3CrX2A

For newer old computers I would suggest, in no particular order: Vector Linux, WattOS, Puppy Linux, Trisquel Mini, PeppermintOS, SliTaz. From those, WattOS and PeppermintOS are most likely to be usable for a Linux newbie without too much problems.

Vector Linux is good, if you can configure it to your liking, which might take a while on the first time. Puppy is pretty good overall, but might be a bit confusing if you are not willing to learn how it works.

Both WattOS and PeppermintOS are based on Ubuntu, so there is a bigger chance that in case of problems the tips and advice given to Ubuntu users will apply pretty much straight to them.

For computers slower than Pentium III, Tiny Core might be the best bet, but it can be confusing to setup without reading a lot of tutorials, I would give Puppy a try there too, and see if it runs well.

Q4OS, now that is a distro that I haven't tried ever myself, and haven't even heard of it before, might have to try it out in the near future.

Sad thing is, that while modern Linux can be made pretty lightweight, Pentium II and lower computers might do better with older versions of Linux, but that ofcourse means no new updates or programs.

The slowest computer I have running at the moment is an Asus EEEPC 701 SD which has 8GB "SSD" Mobile Celeron 900MHz processor, which I think is underclocked to 630MHz, 512Mb or DDR2 ram and Intel GMA900 GPU, I use WattOS on that thing, and while it is a bit slow using Firefox thanks to the low amount of ram and really totally crap processor in all other ways it is surprisingly usable. Even Firefox works well enough, if you stay out of sites like YouTube and such.

EDIT: The most important thing I have found playing around with these lightweight Linux distros, is the amount of RAM, if your computer supports 512MB or more RAM, and you can install that much, you will have a much better time on old computers there. The OS itself runs fine on say 128MB, but the software, if you want to go as modern as possible, will hog most of it and swap like mad.

My 2 cents for PIII and up, Bodhi Linux. http://www.bodhilinux.com/

Not really intended for 486's but still in the light distros category. For eye-candy seekers like myself, this is the king. I wanted a light distro not for a very-very old computer, but for a Celeron 1.3GHz laptop just for browsing. Tried a 2-digit number of distros and ended up using Bohdi. Although it definitely had a close fight with slitaz.

computergeek92 wrote:

Though I would rather install Puppy on my systems' hard drives rather than waste a precious optical drive bay to keep the OS CD in there all the time.

Why are your optical drive bays so "precious" ? Are you putting three 5.25" drives in all of your computers or something..?

In any case, it is indeed possible to install Puppy to a hard drive.
http://puppylinux.org/main/How%20NOT%20to%20i … all%20Puppy.htm

Tell you the truth I'd much rather go online with a 486 and do everything except Youtube and such. 😀

You'd like everything to be slow and mostly broken?

Maybe someone's messing with drive cages?

No. You need to have a CD drive available to load cd games on when you dual boot Windows 95 with it. If Puppy needs to be in my first drive all the time to be able to boot back and forth from the two, I will need 2 CD drives in the tower.

I prefer to have my OS installed on the hard drive and not waste a CD drive.

Jorpho wrote:

Why are your optical drive bays so "precious" ? Are you putting three 5.25" drives in all of your computers or something..? […]
Show full quote

computergeek92 wrote:

Though I would rather install Puppy on my systems' hard drives rather than waste a precious optical drive bay to keep the OS CD in there all the time.

Why are your optical drive bays so "precious" ? Are you putting three 5.25" drives in all of your computers or something..?

In any case, it is indeed possible to install Puppy to a hard drive.
http://puppylinux.org/main/How%20NOT%20to%20i … all%20Puppy.htm

Tell you the truth I'd much rather go online with a 486 and do everything except Youtube and such. 😀

You'd like everything to be slow and mostly broken?

Not intending for it to be slow and broken. I have much faster computers anyway. I just like playing around with old hardware just like you do. Testing limits and maxing out a systems' usefulness is fun.

What do you all think of Elementary OS?

computergeek92 wrote:

No. You need to have a CD drive available to load cd games on when you dual boot Windows 95 with it. If Puppy needs to be in my first drive all the time to be able to boot back and forth from the two, I will need 2 CD drives in the tower.

...Um, why not just take the Puppy CD out when you want to use Windows 95, and then put i back in when you want to run a CD game? Especially considering you won't be playing the same CD game all the time anyway?

Also, I for one find CD drives to be one of the most disposable/salvagable components out there, but perhaps things are different where you are.

Salix with one of the lighter desktop environments, or possibly Arch Linux if you fancy doing a little more work. I'd also suggest the BSDs.

Both Salix and the BSDs are fine on pentium II hardware, although it's too slow for browsing, and lacks SSE so whilst the base operating system may work, other software may not.

I also use Salix as the dom0 operating system on my main system, using Xen. It has dependency management, so it's not quite as painful as Slackware to use.

ynari wrote:

Salix with one of the lighter desktop environments, or possibly Arch Linux if you fancy doing a little more work. I'd also suggest the BSDs. I also use Salix as the dom0 operating system on my main system, using Xen. It has dependency management, so it's not quite as painful as Slackware to use.

My $0.02, Slackware has slapt-get as far as the dep management issue goes.

Recently I've been experimenting with possible linux distros to install on a Pentium DOS/Win9x machine. Not for everyday use but for system administration stuff, including repartitioning (gparted), disk imaging (dd), easy mounting of network shares (samba) and transferring files with the rest of the LAN.
Those are the main goals. Secondary bonuses would include light desktop capability and good 2D GUI acceleration with old video cards (S3 and Matrox are most likely to be used, but Voodoo3 is possible and I'd like it to adapt to changes easily).
I've observed that while newer distros claim to have drivers for these old cards, they perform like they're in plain VESA mode, or don't work at all. The drivers say they're "fully accelerated" in man pages, and that might be true for the drivers themselves, but something has broken them at some point, and from what little I understand I think it's x.org.

I tried DSL and it's definitely quick, but seems overly limited. The main drawback for me is it doesn't have gparted and from a developer discussion thread it sounds like it wasn't feasible to add it.
One of my favorite old boot discs is knoppix 3.9, so I tried that and it was faster than any of the puppy versions I tried (2, 3, and 5) but it only has "qtparted" which seems weakly functional compared to gparted.
More recently I found that Puppy 2 and 3 have a 2GB file size limitation. I imagine lots of other distros have this same problem. It's a dealbreaker when trying to transfer image files across the network. Puppy 5 fixed it, but it's slower and uglier than 2 and 3. My Puppy 4 disc won't boot, I'd need to burn a new disc to try it.

Of the distros I've tried, DSL stood out as the only viable option for a seriously RAM limited system, such as a real 486 with 64MB of RAM or less. It's on a different tier of RAM thriftiness and performance compared to anything else I tried, and if I was building a 486 I'd be grateful for it's existence. However, due to it's limitations I don't find any reason to run it on machines that are halfway equipped to run some other distro.

For some reason the DSL developers were stubbornly committed to that silly 50.5MB disc size limit. Their web site comments on that topic say that they think the disc size was the appeal of the distro, and it really is the first thing everybody brags about, but I never understood why. I guess that's the size of a mini-CDR. What were people doing, putting mini-CDs in their wallet and handing them out at parties? I don't get it. A real CDR is 650MB, no reason not to fill it with something useful. Doesn't mean you have to load more into RAM just because the files are available on disc. Anyway, what's there in those 50.5MB could be useful for a system that can't run anything else.

I just downloaded CentOS 3 (which I think is based on RedHat 9 and uses the old 2.4 kernel, but was updated more recently than most 2.4 distros) and will probably try it next. The whole redhat line is probably a mistake for ease of use, but I feel tempted to try them anyway because redhat is where I have the most past experience.

shamino wrote:

Recently I've been experimenting with possible linux distros to install on a Pentium DOS/Win9x machine. Not for everyday use but for system administration stuff, including repartitioning (gparted), disk imaging (dd), easy mounting of network shares (samba) and transferring files with the rest of the LAN.
Those are the main goals.

I have to say, these seem like exceptionally singular goals. Especially combined with video acceleration. Perhaps this would be a good case for something built up from scratch using Arch?

More recently I found that Puppy 2 and 3 have a 2GB file size limitation. I imagine lots of other distros have this same problem. It's a dealbreaker when trying to transfer image files across the network.

What are you doing on a Pentium that requires files larger than 2 GB..? If you're making disk images, surely using filesplitting is not a deal breaker?

shamino wrote:

For some reason the DSL developers were stubbornly committed to that silly 50.5MB disc size limit. Their web site comments on that topic say that they think the disc size was the appeal of the distro, and it really is the first thing everybody brags about, but I never understood why. I guess that's the size of a mini-CDR. What were people doing, putting mini-CDs in their wallet and handing them out at parties? I don't get it. A real CDR is 650MB, no reason not to fill it with something useful. Doesn't mean you have to load more into RAM just because the files are available on disc. Anyway, what's there in those 50.5MB could be useful for a system that can't run anything else.

Not even that, 50MB is for a business card-sized CD (a mini CD-R is about 210MB). I remember using DSL back when USB flash drives weren't totally ubiquitous so a Linux distro that could be literally handed out like a business card certainly had some appeal, but it's quite silly now. Fortunately there's a spinoff by the DSL developers called DSL-N without the size limit so it includes more stuff. 😀

Jorpho wrote:

shamino wrote:

Recently I've been experimenting with possible linux distros to install on a Pentium DOS/Win9x machine. Not for everyday use but for system administration stuff, including repartitioning (gparted), disk imaging (dd), easy mounting of network shares (samba) and transferring files with the rest of the LAN.
Those are the main goals.

I have to say, these seem like exceptionally singular goals. Especially combined with video acceleration. Perhaps this would be a good case for something built up from scratch using Arch?

Video acceleration may be a problem but as far as the most important functions, it seems like stuff that's basic to many distros out of the box, although ease of use varies. Disk space isn't a problem so I don't mind a higher featured distro as long as it does those things well. Any other capability is a bonus.
I've never touched Arch, don't know much about it other than it apparently has a reputation of being very... involved. Right now I'm still in the mode of playing with prebuilt distros.

More recently I found that Puppy 2 and 3 have a 2GB file size limitation. I imagine lots of other distros have this same problem. It's a dealbreaker when trying to transfer image files across the network.

What are you doing on a Pentium that requires files larger than 2 GB..? If you're making disk images, surely using filesplitting is not a deal breaker?

Yes, disk images.
Puppy 2 and 3 had promise, enabling the LAN and connecting through Samba was easy through the GUI (something that manages to be a hassle on some distros). I did not like the file manager it uses but I could live with it.
File splitting would work as a last resort, so maybe it's not quite a "dealbreaker" but it's too clunky for something that I consider core functionality of the install. I don't want to have to mess with splitting dd output into pieces and then using a bunch of offsets for each piece when restoring them later. I want the imaging process to be simple and not feel like any more of a chore than it has to.

Edit: For the record, I just did another experiment in Puppy 3 and found that it actually does support large files locally. The 2GB problem only happens when sending them through Samba. That makes the problem appear more likely to be fixable.
I might just try NFS instead, because the file server is linux anyway and even without the 2GB issue I've already had trouble getting samba clients (on this as well as other boxes) to connect to the samba server. WinXP and Samba get along great (in either direction) but Samba to Samba has been mysteriously difficult. NFS may be the simple solution to both problems.