Linux For An Old Laptop

Today’s tip is for those of you who may have an old laptop which is practically worthless by today’s standards, but still functional. I have such a machine (Pentium 266 MMX, 80 MB RAM, 4 GB HD) which still sports a “Designed for Windows 95″ sticker.

While I could load Windows 98 on the machine, finding the drivers for the devices and my ancient Orinoco wireless card would be more trouble than I care to deal with, so instead I looked for a lightweight Linux distribution. The one I found was Puppy Linux.

I downloaded and burned the live CD and then proceeded to use its graphical installer to put it on the hard drive. After about 10 minutes I had Puppy Linux totally installed on my hard drive. After a reboot and 5 minutes more, I used the graphical network configuration tool to configure my wireless card and now I’m set. In fact I am writing this tip from inside my new Puppy Linux install.

I plan to just use this machine to either remote connect to my other machine or just use the wireless internet from around the house, so I really don’t need any horsepower.

So if you have an old laptop, or can get one, I would recommend Puppy Linux be on your list of OS’s to try.

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http://webpages.charter.net/alienjeff/ alienjeff
I’ve got an old Gateway Solo 5150 lappy that serves me well. Regardless of what various distros say about minimum HW requirements, you can do yourself a huge favor by maxing out the RAM on such machines. Besides saving hard drive thrashing from the inevitable swap partition activity on low RAM machines, apps will respond much more quickly.
It has been my experience that RAM provides the biggest bang for the buck with these old lappies.
Check out these folks for RAM for older boxes and lappies: http://www.oempcworld.com/PC_memory1.htm
-aj
Lowell
Attempted to connect to your puppy linux link, but IE7 will not go to that site. Is it my PC/IE7 or your link? Let me know.
http://www.132solutions.com Jason Faulkner
That is odd, the site doesn’t work for me either… try this link:
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/news.php
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Les K
Best performance for slightly more up-to-date laptops ( 500-800Mhz ) is gained with another Linux distro – Mandriva Free 2007. Picks up devices a treat; there’s a huge repository of additional software to download, and you can mix both desktop & Server software on one OS. Hard to beat !
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