Welcome to the Linux Foundation Forum!
Suggested OS for Compaq Armada 1592 DMT, heavily trimmed down
suaiteach
Posts: 5
in Installation
Would like to turn an ancient laptop into a nice typewriter, without any other applications except office, and without being told to buy a new laptop. Here are the specs:
Compaq Armada 1592 DMT
Pentium 2 200mhz
32 mb RAM
OS and applications must fit on 1.25 gb hard drive
Would like either a Windows shell to run Microsoft Office 97, or a similar office suite
Laptop is fully supported by towers, so all I need is suggestions on which distro to use and which packages to install, plus instructions on stripping extra applications out of the OS to leave just what I want.
0
Comments
-
I have not seen a laptop with so little RAM is quite a while, you may try using puppy linux, but there is no guarantee that you have enough RAM to run a Gui.0
-
Debian can be installed on older, low RAM systems, although 32mb is pretty small even for that. I run Debian Etch on a 64mb ARM board, and it will work ok on a 32mb one as well.0
-
Look into AntiX, it was made for older computers, Sorry, I'm on the phone and can't copy and paste a link.0
-
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll try the Debian releases and see what happens.
Found this: http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst and now wondering how useful that will be. I've only installed Ubuntu on one computer, and I opted to format the hard drive; the wizard it came with was very useful, but now I'm faced with partitioning this other hard drive and I'm not sure how user-friendly the distros provided on this page will be. Help!0 -
You don't have a lot of options with a system with 32mb of ram. I recommend using one of the light distros like puppy linux, archbang, debian, and antiX. Your best option is to install a distro without GUI.
Look at www.distrowatch.com to get more information.0 -
Another thing, if you are to use a gui, use openbox or fluxbox. Openbox is compatible with GTK+ with is what gnome is built on. So can run most apps designed for GnomeX.0
-
I have the answer for you I believe. You need to look into a distribution called "Damn Small Linux" With a graphical user interface it has a system requirement of only 24 megabytes which your actually over that. Here is the site to the wiki with the system requirements: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Minimum_Hardware_Requirements
Here is the link to download DSL: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/download.html
The goal of DSL was to remain no larger then 50MB and give people a light, easy to use interface. I have not used this personally, but with it having such a low system requirement WITH their GUI. I believe you should very well look into it and try it out.
Let me know how it works out for you.
0 -
Also, in your case i'd make sure I made my swap partition first on your drive and being as generous with it as possible.0
-
I tried DSL on an OLD toshiba laptop with 128mb of ram. This was the one I couldn't remember. The GUI is not all that great, yet good enough. It's better used as a terminal.0
-
DSL sounds great, except the links to the downloads are mostly shot. Most of them are gone, the other two expect me to know how to compile. I've yet to figure that out on my system, and it'd really be much easier if there were an already compiled version hanging around somewhere. Would you mind posting a link to that?
Also, there is a 128 mb ram chip that could be installed if the stupid machine would recognize it, though that may be a problem with the operating system and not actual hardware incompatibility. I prefer to use a GUI, having used Windows all my life the terminal's more than a little intimidating.0 -
Here is a live link: http://ftp.belnet.be/packages/damnsmalllinux/current/
You want the dsl-4.4.10.iso and dsl-4.4.10.iso.md5.txt files, along with the 1-readme_first.txt file and probably the contents of the documentation folder. Burn the .iso file to a CD and use that to boot the system you are going to install it on. That is the installer, and no building should be necessary at this point to get a functioning system.
Also, here is the root to the DSL repository: http://ftp.belnet.be/packages/damnsmalllinux/
Note that the ibiblio site no longer hosts DSL, and AFAIK, the belnet.be site is probably the main host these days. So, any references to the ibiblio site for repositories and such will not work. Use the belnet.be URLs instead.
Finally, DSL is quite dated - the latest ISO files are 3 years old. However, that should not really be an issue for an older and underpowered system like you have.0 -
Found another linux distro built for older systems, luitlinux
http://luitlinux.sarovar.org/, can ran on systems with as little as 32mb of ram.
Here is a screenshot of the system
http://luitlinux.sarovar.org/screenshots/luitlinux-0.4.jpg0
Categories
- All Categories
- 49 LFX Mentorship
- 102 LFX Mentorship: Linux Kernel
- 553 Linux Foundation Boot Camps
- 296 Cloud Engineer Boot Camp
- 119 Advanced Cloud Engineer Boot Camp
- 52 DevOps Engineer Boot Camp
- 53 Cloud Native Developer Boot Camp
- 4 Express Training Courses
- 4 Express Courses - Discussion Forum
- 1.9K Training Courses
- 18 LFC110 Class Forum
- 6 LFC131 Class Forum
- 25 LFD102 Class Forum
- 150 LFD103 Class Forum
- 17 LFD121 Class Forum
- LFD137 Class Forum
- 61 LFD201 Class Forum
- LFD210 Class Forum
- LFD210-CN Class Forum
- 1 LFD213 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 128 LFD232 Class Forum
- LFD237 Class Forum
- 23 LFD254 Class Forum
- 598 LFD259 Class Forum
- 102 LFD272 Class Forum
- 1 LFD272-JP クラス フォーラム
- LFD273 Class Forum
- 2 LFS145 Class Forum
- 24 LFS200 Class Forum
- 739 LFS201 Class Forum
- 1 LFS201-JP クラス フォーラム
- 3 LFS203 Class Forum
- 69 LFS207 Class Forum
- 300 LFS211 Class Forum
- 54 LFS216 Class Forum
- 47 LFS241 Class Forum
- 41 LFS242 Class Forum
- 37 LFS243 Class Forum
- 11 LFS244 Class Forum
- 34 LFS250 Class Forum
- 1 LFS250-JP クラス フォーラム
- LFS251 Class Forum
- 140 LFS253 Class Forum
- LFS254 Class Forum
- 1K LFS258 Class Forum
- 10 LFS258-JP クラス フォーラム
- 92 LFS260 Class Forum
- 130 LFS261 Class Forum
- 32 LFS262 Class Forum
- 79 LFS263 Class Forum
- 15 LFS264 Class Forum
- 11 LFS266 Class Forum
- 17 LFS267 Class Forum
- 17 LFS268 Class Forum
- 23 LFS269 Class Forum
- 203 LFS272 Class Forum
- 1 LFS272-JP クラス フォーラム
- LFS281 Class Forum
- 221 LFW211 Class Forum
- 167 LFW212 Class Forum
- SKF100 Class Forum
- 901 Hardware
- 219 Drivers
- 74 I/O Devices
- 44 Monitors
- 115 Multimedia
- 208 Networking
- 101 Printers & Scanners
- 85 Storage
- 761 Linux Distributions
- 88 Debian
- 66 Fedora
- 15 Linux Mint
- 13 Mageia
- 24 openSUSE
- 141 Red Hat Enterprise
- 33 Slackware
- 13 SUSE Enterprise
- 356 Ubuntu
- 477 Linux System Administration
- 41 Cloud Computing
- 69 Command Line/Scripting
- Github systems admin projects
- 95 Linux Security
- 77 Network Management
- 108 System Management
- 49 Web Management
- 66 Mobile Computing
- 23 Android
- 29 Development
- 1.2K New to Linux
- 1.1K Getting Started with Linux
- 536 Off Topic
- 131 Introductions
- 216 Small Talk
- 21 Study Material
- 817 Programming and Development
- 275 Kernel Development
- 508 Software Development
- 928 Software
- 260 Applications
- 184 Command Line
- 3 Compiling/Installing
- 76 Games
- 316 Installation
- 59 All In Program
- 59 All In Forum
Upcoming Training
-
August 20, 2018
Kubernetes Administration (LFS458)
-
August 20, 2018
Linux System Administration (LFS301)
-
August 27, 2018
Open Source Virtualization (LFS462)
-
August 27, 2018
Linux Kernel Debugging and Security (LFD440)