“I am faced with a challenge: I need to find a Linux distribution that is both small enough, efficient enough and easy enough to maintain for my laptop. Realizing that all Linux distributions are not created equal, I did my research and was able to narrow my list to a handful of distributions that may be suitable for my needs and my laptop. Throughout the course of this article, I am going to test each of these distributions on my laptop and discuss my experiences. I will attempt to install and evaluate each distribution for a period of a couple of days. Based on my findings, I will select the distribution that best suits my needs.”
FreeBSD FTW. 🙂
Well, Slackware too. I like Slack.
Did you read the article ? He wants Linux not FreeBSD.
A nice fast one for his older processor can be found here
http://www.yoper.com/
although, a lot of people do not like the personalities involved with that distro, still, it is fast.
Most of the apps in ports system are the same you’d find in standard Linux distros. FreeBSD also has blazing fast Linux binary compatibility mode. In my experience Quake 3 ran faster in FBSD than on slim Gentoo install, I don’t have any benchmarks to prove that though.
Anyway, FreeBSD is very viable alternative to Linux, especially on desktop where you almost don’t feel any difference.
PC-BSD or DesktopBSD is much better choice for older hardware. You can install precompiled software from ports or PBI(for PC-BSD only) directory http://www.pbidir.com. 128MB is enough for KDE. Browsing with Konqueror is no brainer and I won’t recommend Mozilla soft(bloat)ware for anyone. Kmail got all functions you have in Thunderbird + groupware support. Kopete is a best IM client known to man, even better than MSN messenger. Quanta Plus, amaroK, Kmplayer, whatever you want all is here in BSD…
I have an old PII 233 MHz with 48 MB and the only distros that have ever worked are Slackware and DSL, right now I have Slack 10.2 on it running fluxbox. It runs quite fast for such an old computer, and it looks awesome thanks to fluxbox.
From real experience and lots of trials with this stuff, there is a sort of dividing line around 500mhz PIII. At or over that line, you should be able to get any of the big distros in, if you’re intelligent about not installing the kitchen sink, and they will work fine. I’ve been fine with Mandriva 2006 and Gnome on such machines with 128 or 192 Mb memory.
Once you go below this, eg to K6, none of the majors work, including Vector Soho. The problem is either KDE or Gnome, which are both two slow. Memory is irrelevant and doesn’t really help.
If you’re really serious about Linux, and maybe W98 is a more pragmatic choice for this hardware, you have to do a custom install of either Slackware or Debian, and pick WindowMaker, FVWM, OpenBox, Enlightenment, Fluxbox as your desktop. I’ve had WindowMaker/Debian work acceptably on a 200mhz MMX with 64Mb memory, and nothing else would even start. KOffice ran fine. xfe as the file manager. xfce is borderline, it can work, or it can be too slow. It is faster than Gnome or KDE, but Windowmaker seems to beat it on speed, while still being usable.
I’ve no experience of Celerons in this context, but in his place would have done a Debian install and just put in Windowmaker, then added to it with apt-get, stopping before it slowed down. On a laptop you might have to work at it to get sleep working properly, but at least the system itself would run, and I should think run quite fast.
One test is, run DSL from the CD. If this is really snappy, probably the Debian install will work. Though I found it hard to use apt-get to install a different window manager on earlier versions of DSL. Puppy also runs fast, and one hears good things about Zenwalk (xfce).
I’m happy with vim, mutt and links2 for 99% of what I do. I could make do with a high-end 486 and 64MB / RAM. My only- *only*- concerns are heat, battery power and reliability.
I’ve always thought that something like a used Panasonic Toughbook with a new battery might be perfect for what I’m looking for. Old laptops use less energy and generate less heat. Of course, batteries have short shelf lives and older mobile components- HDs especially- mean a sharp drop in reliability.
There are plenty of great distros for old machines. Slackware, Debian, cross-compiled Gentoo… the bigger issue is finding hardware that works well after several years. That’s what I’d be REALLY interested in hearing about. If anyone has any experience to share with regards to this, please, share!!!
>>
I’m happy with vim, mutt and links2 for 99% of what I do. I could make do with a high-end 486 and 64MB / RAM. <<
Are you using any WM at all? If so, which one?
Eliminate x-window, and linux works fine on a 386 with 16MB RAM, and a 256K VGA card. The GUIs are always the resource hogs on Linux.
I suppose, but we’re talking about laptops here. I remember 386 laptops. Not very nice screens 🙂 Not the most portable, either, and most probably don’t have working batteries.
“I intend to install test the following minimal set of applications and tools:
KDE – My desktop manager of choice.
BlueFish – A GTK text editor with extensible support for HTML and PHP.
Mozilla Firefox – My preferred web browser
Mozilla Thunderbird – For e-mail
GIMP – A GTK, multi-platform graphics editor, a must for any web developer.”
“The biggest challenge that I have is the storage space. I have already eliminated any unnecessary components and programs from the Windows installation to increase the available space for my Linux partition. I am, however, still limited to a partition roughly 2 Gigabytes in size.”
“Where possible, I will try to minimize the footprint of any installation. Since space is at a premium on my laptop, my ability to reduce the size of my installation will greatly influence my final decision.”
It seems to me, after reading this article, that the author went for his favorite distro: Gentoo, from the beginning, regardless of the other alternatives. Which is fine and dandy, as long as he acknowledges this before engaging in this pseudo analysis. I would have accepted this because it’s his prerrogative and what he likes. But to say asinine statements such as (K)ubuntu has no docs, please.
Let’s see, he’s trying to mimimize the footprint, he only got 2 gigs to spare, what does he do? He installs KDE, Firefox, and Thunderbird, bloated and memory hogs.
He chooses bloated distros: Fedora, SuSE, and Kubuntu, he claims Kubuntu has no docs, he’s probably being burned in effigy by the ubuntu forums regulars who can in all honesty, say they have the best wikies this side of gentoo.
With 2 gigs of space to spare, i would have chosen Debian (~400 MB with a minimal install), choose a window manager such as Fluxbox, Icewm, or Ion3. A light editor with everything you need such as Joe in addition to his beloved Bluefish. Opera for browsing (4 MB) and Sylpheed, Mutt, or Pine for email.
It seems to me the author did not take in consideration the restraints of space, denoting a lack of experience.
Waste of time, nothing learned.
Edited 2006-05-19 22:03
He did not say kUbuntu did not have docs. Just that they were inadequate. And they are, when you’re used to Gentoo documentation.
However, it beats me why he goes for a source-based distribution on a medium-range computer. Even a LFS base system would take days to compile on his laptop.
I’d recommend Arch Linux or Slackware, perhaps DesktopBSD (forget PC-BSD – static compiled libraries are unacceptable).
Personally I use Gentoo, but come on… compiling from source with so little resources. It’s pure S/M.
agreed. a distro for such dinosaur hardware should not include anything from kde,gnome etc. any user who demands these features on such ancient hardware is simply out of his mind. and who the #$% are these people? just go work three nights a week at a bar and buy a new computer.
I have an old Compaq K6-2/400 laptop with 64MB ram and a cracked display (Note to self: Don’t drop your Palm onto an LCD display…) that’s running FreeBSD 5.5 as a charm. It’s only purpose right now is as a print and NFS server. The nice thing is you don’t need an UPS!
Current uptime is 87 days.
Working with a Compaq Armada M300 P3-500 and 192megs of ram, I have had success with DSL (and the new DSL-N looks interesting), and also Mepis Lite.
DSL obviously can work well on much less that what I have, so it’s fine.
Mepis Lite, although it seemed to have gotten corrupted on my machine (and I went back to DSL), was quite amazing. Worked great with a modern KDE, quite speedy, good hardware detection (both DSL and Mepis were equally good, but I did make sure my wireless was well supported before buying on EBAY). I hope the new ubuntu-based Mepis comes out with a new Lite version, because I’d like to go back to that mix of speed and functionality. DSL is great for web surfing and using OOo on occasion via the mydsl extensions, but I’d like to do a bit more.
I never did figure out what was “missing” in Mepis Lite to make such a dramatic difference. Start up services? Memory footprint?
I wonder why he didn’t try Debian… (maybe instead of Ubuntu)
For a computer like his, I’d go with Debian rightaway.
I am very surprised he rates Gentoo Linux that high. I have Gentoo on a desktop, and I’ve used it on a laptop too. Personally, I think Gentoo isn’t a good choice for a laptop with limited disk space and a slow harddisk. And I also think it’s not a good choice for older hardware. Wait till he has used it a couple of months and gets tired of waiting for the compiles each time he upgrades his software.
I also doubt you can have a practical Gentoo installation in under 2giga… Note that on Gentoo, you need extra space for the portage tree, for the header files (since the header files are installed for each package), extra temporary space for decompressing the source of a package and compiling it (needed for installation of software).
I also find it a bit surprising that his favorite applications all use GTK, but then he insists on using KDE. I think his 128Mb ram would be a lot happier with something like fluxbox or xfce or maybe even gnome.
“I also find it a bit surprising that his favorite applications all use GTK, but then he insists on using KDE. I think his 128Mb ram would be a lot happier with something like fluxbox or xfce or maybe even gnome.”
I actually end up in a similar situation, as I prefer KDE, but I use a lot of GTK apps, GAIM, GIMP, Firefox, I even use GDM as I prefer it instead of KDM. That’s the beauty of OSS, choice
Are you joking ?
On my centrino 1.7ghz with 512Mbytes of memory I find KDE slow even with no effects, firefox take so much memory that I’m sure it can take 128MB itself, and working with gimp without memory is unbelievable.
Add OpenOffice 2 and you’re done.
You should try X with http://www.fvwm.org (maximum) and try to prevent use of something that use QT.
Abiword , Gnumeric seems to use pragmatically memory while having enough functionnalities.
Opera 8.52 seems a good choice for the web and include an email client.
Edited 2006-05-19 22:05
I guess I thought the comment that the text based installer was a negative for Vector Linux was just a weird comment to make for a guy that regularly uses Gentoo. I’ve never used VL, and I’ve never thought text-based installers were hard to use. What is so difficult about a text based install? I’ve installed Slackware many times and have never thought it was a drawback. A text based install might be a chore for a newbie, but for a regular Gentoo user? I think not.
I once used FreeBSD on a laptop that had 4 gigs of free space on the hard drive and I attempted to compile OpenOffice from FreeBSD’s “Ports” tree but I found out that 4 gigs of free space was not enough for this task. I expect that one would get more or less similar results using Gentoo’s Portage.
I think this is something that I will do too, just for the learning experience. I have been using linux for roughly a decade too , but I find myself getting stuck in a distro for a period before changing. When I change
it’s usually a pile of known distro’s and the one that works first (usually for me allows me to install and detects my hardware one time ) i use. ( lazy i know )
so it was like this:: slackware –> redhat –> mandrake- -> ubuntu
I don’t know why the author ( this isn’t a stab) was concerned about using all these well known distro’s. There a lot of smaller footprint distro’s out there than the ones mentioned, which SEEM to deal with this exact problem. If they have squirky hardware installation procedures , it should be okay shouldn’t it ? I mean hey command line don’t make us creep does it?
Think about it , it’s an old piece of hardware , it’s probably going to be a one time install with the software you need right? Youre not thinking of upgrading to OO ver 3 are we? So in light of the fact that it might be a one time install, shouldn’t features such as longevity and extensive community be less emphasized ? OpenSuse,Fedora Ubuntu ?… Just a thought, from a long time user.
🙂
From the point of the article, I think the biggest limitation is the 2G hard drive space. Aside from that it’s not so bad.
I agree with some of the others above that KDE is probably not the best choice for WM/DE. I myself have a Celeron 366/192MB RAM/GeForce2/4G HD combo. I do run Gentoo on that. However, I chose to use xfce as that is not as much of a hog as say KDE/Gnome on older hardware like mine. On the other hand, Thunderbird/Firefox may be a hog but then if the author needed to have identical high-level software on all machines that’s really no way around it.
Overall, I think Gentoo is not a bad choice for the author’s situation. The only biggest strike against Gentoo for a 800MHz Celeron is the compile times. In this case, the author could use the server as the compilation server and share the compiled binaries once it’s done without making the laptop do so much work.
I do wonder if other distros like Mepis lite would have been just as good although they are not tested.
On my laptop (P3 I gig, 384 ram) I’ve found SuSE too slow and ponderous, though that was version 10.0. Debian and Xfce worked OK but was too labour-intensive. The one that really flies is Xfce + Ubuntu. Xfce strikes me as ideal for situations where resources are fairly limited but when you still want a full desktop “feel”. Both KDE and Gnome need far more than the writer’s laptop has to offer, imho. Lighter-weight gtk programs like sylpheed-claws make good substitutes for Kmail or Evolution, so are a good fit for Xfce. Checking free -m under Xfce, I’m typically using 70-80 megs of ram without really trying to conserve resources, so plenty to spare if you have 128 megs on board. Less than that, and I guess it is fluxbox or similar.
…Slax, and contrary to popular belief, it can be installed to a hard disk. 🙂
Edited 2006-05-19 23:38
I like Mephis lite, but it kept getting corrupt and I never could figure out why. Debian would be my first choice for the described hardware. DSL might be too lite. I have had good luck with Puppy. Did anyone think of a lite distro on a CF card installed in a PC card adaptor?
Like many others, I am surprised he didn’t even consider Debian. With its 115 MB netinstaller and the extreme flexibility it gives you in choosing what you want, it would have seemed like the ideal choice to me.
A good choice of desktop could have been Xfce4
Or even Fluxbox. Debian is very light weight and I was also surprised it wasn’t considered; it couldn’t be because of the install process because if you can install Gentoo you can install Debian.
i am not sure how he can suitably meet his requirements of running apps like firefox etc on such old hardware. yes firefox “will run” on it, but i would expect the experience to be dismal.
hell, lets just take up a donation and buy him a real computer.
ideal for old PC’s in need of a KDE desktop.
Why is it that when people talk about their old hardware, the specs are always better than my best machine?
For anyone who wants to know – it cannae go fell wi’ DSL! I got it on me 233 mhz tosh – runs like a dream.
Damn Small Linux has now a big brother (or maybe it’s big sister?): DSL-N.
http://damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-n/
DSL-N has 2.6 kernel, some GTK2 apps and improved hardware detection & support. It’s still in early development but it already looks interesting, especially if you don’t need KDE (which, IMO, is a bad DE choice for low-spec systems anyway). DSL-N can be installed to hard drive as a Debian system, which makes lots of applications easily available via apt-get.
Edited 2006-05-20 13:58
I think this guy’s time would have been better spent buying a new laptop (one with much larger RAM [128MB – you can’t run *any* graphical OS – including XP – in that size of RAM and expect to be able to run modern apps with it without extreme disk thrashing] and hard disk – 2GB is ridiculously small to fit an OS *and* graphical apps in).
Which distro you pick and ultimately prefer will depend on your level of expertise and how much post-install tweaking you’re prepared to do. Although I can install Linux from scratch from the command line, doing so via Gentoo made me want to pull my fingernails out and scream (yes, you get an optimised system, but the install process is tortuous beyond belief).
I personally prefer a balance of a nice installer with some tweaking after installation where necessary – of recent distros, I’d say Fedora Core 5 and OpenSuSE 10.1 are clear leaders for me. Ironically, these two are the basis for the #1 and #2 Enterprise Linux distros out there, so if you use Enterprise Linux at work, it’ll help enormously if you use a free clone of it at home.
Heck, I recently set up CentOS 4.3 – another distro in the RHEL/Fedora family – as a text-only torrent server at home. It’s quite easy to kill off unwanted services, set up cron jobs and so on and you get a lean setup – yes, the machine “only” had 512MB RAM and I felt that’s enough to run BitTorrent and a text-mode Linux and nothing else. It’s risible that the article’s author is trying to run KDE, Firefox, Bluefish, Thunderbird and GIMP on a 128MB machine…even running one app at a time will cause major swapping on *any* distro, no matter how lean you trim it down.
Quite an interesting and well balanced review. But I’m wondering why he didn’t try to use X11 remotely (like ssh -X), since he’s allready storing his web projects on his server. Works with any OS supporting X11 (that’d be Windows too, with Cygwin)
Edited 2006-05-20 16:07
Probably because it sounded like he wanted to run his laptop on the move, in environments where an X host wouldn’t necessarily be available.