Revive that old PC!
Just thought you guys might be interested in something like this…in case you have an old laptop or something sitting around collecting dust
My son got a 1ghz PIII the other day…can’t install it because there isn’t a CD ROM and/or the USB won’t boot, otherwise his machine would be running that…fooey
I have used many ultra lightweight linux distros, Puppy Linux, SLAX, DSL, this one is a full install and uses very minimal hardware
On a notebook I have hooked up in the garage I have x86 Xubuntu installed on it. Otherwise I use #! on all my older laptops. Low RAM usage on boot, minimal GUI yet beautiful.
oh wow…crunchbang looks interesting for sure, the Openbox is definitely a lightweight windows manager but for non-linux types it’s a bit daunting…but very very lightweight
Yeah Crunchbang is very terminal oriented. But its designed to help the leary user to be accustomed to using terminal alot more often. All the system settings/preferences are done over Geary/Terminal and have step by step instructions.
Worth giving a shot!
Thanks for the link WarHawk. I’ll try it out on a pcDuino: LinkSprite pcDuino3 – LinkSprite
I’ll probably make it into a NAS.
There was a time when I tried dozens of different linux OS. Everything from Ultimate Edition for huge down to tiny core for the smallest of small. I found Puppy to be the best lightweight linux for anything I’d use it for. I use Ubuntu on all my computers now, and the latest Puppy versions are binary compatible with Ubuntu (well, there’s one compatible with Slackware, too). The lowest spec hardware I’ve ever gotten an OS to install on was a Compaq computer with Cyrix 5X86 processor and 16MB of RAM and I think 5GB hard drive. It had no CD-ROM drive, no USB, no Ethernet, not even a PCI bus for add-in cards. I used a floppy drive to install Puppy 3.x on it (can’t remember exact version). This was back when XP was still the latest Microsoft offering. Since it had no connectivity and no usb, I couldn’t do anything useful with it. But it was a fun exercise.
WarHawk-AVG your son can add a CD-ROM to that PIII can’t he? There is also an option with Puppy to use a floppy to start computers that can’t boot from USB. It then will switch to the USB for the rest of the boot-up and running of the OS. I’ve done that before as well. There are also codes to help boot computers with special needs. Been there, done that, too! In fact, had to use a couple codes to boot the Cyrix, since it didn’t have the same feature-set as the Intel chips. There isn’t a single source for a comprehensive list, but a little poking around with your search engine can usually turn up the code that’s needed to get past a particular error.
LXLE - haven’t looked at it very closely. It came out after my distro-hopping days were pretty much over. I have never been able to enjoy using a lightweight interface on my main computer(s). One man’s bloat is another man’s “feature”. I used Gnome with Ubuntu until they switched to Unity. Now I use that.
Glad to see other BLF members using Linux. I dumped Windows about 11 years ago.
LXLE looks pretty good, nice that it is based solely on LTS versions, only downfall I see is that there is not an embedded version based on ARM but that is a rarity indeed and not really necessary since LXLE very much resembles Lubuntu which has been ported to ARM architecture.
Currently running Linux Mint, Lubuntu, Xubuntu and Bodhi.
Was dual booting various Linux and win XP since XP came out, then about 5~6 years ago changed to Ubuntu only, when Unity came out switched to Lubuntu, for no other reason than I like it 
as I have an AMD st1050 (6x2800 o/c to 6x3500)) with four gig of 1600 ram, while not the latest computer still powerful enough to run any OS.
Cheers David
I’ll have to give this a try.
I’ve been using Linux for servers since 1995 or so. Every year or so I try out some of the desktop options, but they never really stick. They always feel a little…off. So many seams and rough edges. Fewer when last I tried some this spring, but still there to irritate me.
If you are having trouble booting linux over USB on an older system, how about installing onto a drive on another system, then hooking the drive to the problem machine over IDE/SATA?