old machine

[scoville]

I haven't bought a computer since '96. I have a 133 MHz Pentium with 16 Mb RAM. What are the odds of finding an old kernel of any distribution that would run decent on my klunker? How about if I had 64 Mb RAM?

[Bokkenka]

Take a look << here (http://old.lwn.net/Distributions/) >> for older distros.

Don't try to run KDE/Gnome... They'll be too big. Try a smaller/lighter window manager if you want X.

[chris_i386]

The kernel shouldn't be a problem.
You can run a text based linux version on 8 MB without any problems, but as soon as you want a graphical user interface, you should go for at least 32, better yet 64 MB. Debian 2.2 (only a few months old) should work fine on your machine, provided you buy a little extra ram (32 or more). (You should expect big applications like browsers to take about 20-30s to load.)
But if this is your first contact whith Linux, you will have a hard time installing it, though it's doable.
Recent commercial distros expect you to have a computer thats not older than two years.

[lilrabbit129]

I've successfully installed Mandrake 8.1 on my p1 120mhz laptop with only 24megs of ram.

If you use a light WM like Blackbox or IceWM, performance should be good. Only thing is browsing... i mostly only use a text-based browser, but iwth more ram using opera or w3m should have good results.


me