Re: [seul-edu] appropriate lightweight distribution

[Cameron Miller <cdmiller@adams.edu>]

Keir and Robyn wrote:

> I am planning on rebirthing some decrepid P133 16MB 1GB Windows machines 
> as Linux word processing and internet terminals.  Can anyone recommend a 
> distribution?  I was planning on using Red Hat, since it seems the most 
> widely available, but someone suggested that it might be too large and 
> that I should try a ?light weight? distribution such as Slackware.  I 
> was unaware that there were any differences in distributions from a 
> hardware requirement standpoint.  Can anyone suggest a distribution for 
> this purpose?


I suggest investigating debian.  You get very fine grained control of 
which applications, (packages), to install, saving loads of disk space. 
     Use a small window manager like blackbox, afterstep, or fvwm.  For 
word processing try abiword, it installs in about 12MB of disk space and 
only needs 6MB of ram to load.

You will experience disk swapping when running X with only 16MB of RAM, 
but with a small window manager and word processor it shouldn't be too 
bad.  The web browser will probably be your heaviest application, with 
even old Netscape Communicator 4.7 asking for about 15MB of memory to run.

If you are capable, custom compile a minimal kernel as well.

All that being said, the LSTP someone mentioned earlier may be a very 
good way to go if you have a higher end PC to run as a server. You end 
up turning your machines into X-Terminals, leaving most of the RAM, 
disk, and processing requirements on a larger central server.

Best of luck,

- cameron

-- 
- cameron miller
- UNIX Systems Administrator
- cdmiller@adams.edu