Thinking of changing an old laptop’s OS from Windows to Linux? Don’t do it until you read this. The benefits, the pains, the arguments, and the results. It’s possible, but will everybody like it? Read on to find out. My take: For such an old laptop the article describes, either DamnSmallLinux or Windows98SE/ME or FreeBSD with IceWM or BeOS 5.03 are the best bets. Anything with modern UIs would crawl. I am using Gnome/XFce with ArchLinux on my Sony Vaio 333 Mhz PII-mobile with 128 MBs of RAM (almost twice as fast as the laptop in question) and it’s already not as spiffy as Win98SE is on the same laptop. I also have to live with compromises (not loading most services etc).
Bringing an old Laptop back to Life – The experiment
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Does the author mean to say that Linux and FreeBSD are not “modern” operating systems? He might not have meant that, but it sure gives the wrong impression, and equates them with the likes of Windows 98SE and (gag!) Windows ME.
No, I am sure the author meant “more modern graphical environments”.
I understand the frustration using Linux on an old laptop–it seems promising from all we’ve heard about Linux’s breathing new life into old systems, but doesn’t seem to pan out so well in the end. The key to the paradox, as the “My take” seemed to point out, is finding a distribution and customizing it to fit your resources.
I have an elderly Toshiba PI-133MHz, 16MB RAM, 1.2GB system that now runs Linux at reasonable speeds, even in graphical mode! Interestingly, the system crawled after I installed Red Hat 6.1, but came to life when I installed Red Hat 7.0. The key was paring down the installation to the bare minimum, using IceWM as the window manager, and enjoying text-based programs more. The system also works handily as a client to log into another, more powerful system that runs the heavy-duty programs and uses X11forwarding to display them on the laptop. That brings even Mozilla Firefox to a system that barely ran the original Netscape browsers!
The guy was using Debian Woody’s install floppies and therefore needed to download backports from apt-get.org. It would have been much easier to use the new Debian Sarge installer’s floppy version
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
It’s no surprise that Gnome didn’t work well on that hardware. Still, I’m surprised the girlfriend didn’t like XFCE — it’s quite pretty and easy to use. Maybe she would have liked better IceWM with WindowsXP theme. :-p
Sorry about the earlier comment, didn’t read the headline summary carefully enough, looks like I’m in need of some caffine brew. He did mean more modern UI and not OS.
Apologies.
I recently went on a disti-fest, trying out lots of different distributions on my girlfriends laptop. It’s an IBM Thinkpad, old Celeron 333MHz, but it has a DVD rom and it should be ok for general stuff like browsing the net etc.
She gave up on it when 98 started getting all too many problems with viri and needed things like Kerio firewall and virus scanners constantly running, effectively killing the machine. So I got to thinkin’ 😉
…and so the story goes, I went a bit loopy and thought I’d try lots of disti’s for kicks. Now the interesting part is that the Thinkpad only had 64MB of RAM (the horror!), AND a 4GB drive (steam driven thing too).
Mandrake and FC3, wouldn’t install, not even in textmode. Yoper wouldn’t install due to limited disk space, Ubuntu crashed during install (media checked out btw) I suspect memory issues again, Vector Linux worked, but my girlfriend really didn’t like the minimalist desktop options (the new SOHO 5 looks like it might be worth a try though), so I was beginning to wonder which way to turn….DSLinux?
Funny thing, I had a MEPIS live disk kicking around and for a laugh I stuck it in the drive and waited….and waited….and GOOD GRIEF it worked!! 😀 …well, sorta, but it was close enough to working for me to get busy on the terminal and kill off cups and samba deamons then re-start X and YES! KDE!! 😀
AND to my almost trouser-raising pleasure, it actually functioned (KDE I mean). OMG! So I clicked the old MEPIS “install to HDD” and away it went, followed the usual installer and rebooted from the HDD.
The version of MEPIS I had included KDE 3.2 and quite a lot of good apps, Konqueror worked great, and even DVDs played without me having to tinker much with the settings (with only the occasional stutter).
It worked so well that we decided to upgrade the laptop, we’ve purchased a new 80GB 8MB cache HDD, and more memory (another 128MB SODIMM) and await their delivery.
I’m pretty convinced it’ll be worth it, a really “modern” OS with firewall, no viri, office apps and stuff to play with for the cost of a Windows XP licence…..
So fellow Linux “commies”, we have the hardware, we have the knowledge, join me in the voodoo laptop resurrection!
Lets burn some onions!!! 😀
For your : Sony Vaio 333 Mhz PII-mobile with 128 MBs of RAM you must go for IceWM,Blackbox or WindowMaker for the ram specified and the CPU speed they will fast and will not crawl… XFCE is day by day becoming slow as they are opting for effects and sounds and making the UI rich. If you use the ICEWM with good theme you will be happy with user current them and yet get a good speed, performance.
I don’t like IceWM. It looks and is poor. I much prefer to run Win98SE –which is more usable than a simple window manager– than IceWm or fluxbox. From the Unix land, I only like Gnome, and a bit of XFce and maybe KDE. I might run Window Maker if it happens to need my extra cpu/memory, but I much prefer to run Gnome for my “normal” usage.
Of course not. That’s why we need choice.
i hope for you that your laptop supports the 80gb hdd.
i myselfe am writing this on an 500mhz laptop with 192mb ram and 40gb hdd and win xp sp2.
if you have some spare time please install win xp. would be interesting how it will run on it
Author of the article should have tried vectorlinux.
Peace
im going to try the gentoo uclibc stages they are supposed to consume less ram. would be nice to se what diffrence that makes
I once tried BeOS on a comparable laptop (Pentium Pro 133, 64 mb, 2 gig HDD) and it ran like molasses, even before I’d launched a single app. I think BeOS had too many threads running for that processor; it was thrashing to death. On the other hand, it ran faster than anything else when I put it on my P3 450 with 384 mb of RAM, so I don’t think it was *doing* anything too much for the PPro; it was just switching contexts too much.
My biggest recent trouble with an “older” laptop (Dell Latitude CPx) was first, finding a distribution that booted, and second, figuring out how to get apm working. I finally got it to go to sleep, but I loose ethernet when it wakes up.
Why do people always try to run Linux on machines of the last decade. Linux is evolving rapidly, ive been using it since 1998 and it has evolved faster and faster each year. If you want to run Linux on old hardware, try a Debian woody with fluxbox.
My IBM Laptop runs linux, everything works. Out of the box, with the right distro (Vidalinux, based on gentoo).
Its an IBM R40 thinkpad – not the newest either – but the key is to have some common sense, useing IceVM with some decent themes is good, fluxbox is also nice, XFCE is cool too. Using the newest KDE og GNOME on a laptop that will just about run Windows 98 is dumb. Linux is not some kind of magick
– win98 is 7 years old, most new distros are probably fresh of the press, as usual.
Im sick and tired of people trying to install stuff like the newest Fedora Core on their 486 laptops and then go complain about it.
I have no sympathy for the author of the article.
Yes, as you might have guessed I have a machine that will trump all of you. A 1994 Compaq LTE Elite 4/40CX.
66Mhz i486, 24MB of memory, a floppy drive, tiny color screen, two PCMCIA slots, and a 325 HDD. It was sold with Windows 3.1.
The guy who said “Vector” was dead on. I installed an older version of the Slackware-based distro by creating an NFS share from my regular machine’s CDROM.
It runs an old 2.2 kernel, with X and IceWM and whatever services I require. The modem card and network card work fine without any installation hassles. It isn’t fast but it never really was, and I rarely use it but if I need to it’s as useful as it ever could be.
I have a sony laptop with a pIII/333Mhz and 128 megs of ram.
I run redhat 8.0 and fvwm2 with only the pager and it works
great. I have a 10×2 workspace. Emacs is very responsive,
and Firefox runs without any problems too. I had to shut off gtk’s fancy fonts though…
I don’t think that BSD/Linux can compete with Windows of that era and still maintain the same functionality. Why?
Windows 9x is DOS with extras tacked on.
BSD/Linux is way more complex and therefore uses more resources just to run.
PS. My statements might not be 100% acurate but you should get the idea.
Well, here are just a few random thoughts.
1) New users are going to want a DE vs WM. That would probably easy a transition. However, most people are comfortable with their existing OS, aka: they don’t wish to learn or re-learn anything. The user actually has to want to switch. Besides a DE on older hardware is going to probably be too resource intensive.
I do agree with one of the previous posters that IceWM would be a good choice (XP theme). Its the visual familarity.
2) If a switch is going to occur. Have a system that is going to binary installs. Compiling takes a long time and most users don’t want to wait. Their perception to the compile and install would equate too: why in the heck does it take 12 hours to install 1 application. Getting into the converstion about compiling/config/install might get a little overwhelming. People want their systems to just work.
3) Also, light weight apps, like Abi-Word is a good choice. But your average user is going to expect 100% compatiblity.
4) Distro’s user friendliness: AKA some tight intergration. This would translate into having all tools and toys being their and interacting seamsly. Such as, new install, the app’s appear in their respective programs menu. Flash, installed with apps linked to file types.
Overall, if I was going to undertake this challenge, the above would serve as a rough guide. However, trying to manage or work with users expectations is a difficult task in itself. I don’t think I would have accepted the challenge myself given the current hardware. That just me.
i tried DSL in an ancient machine recently. The user thought it was “primitive” and wanted her old win98 desktop back.
I spent the better part of last year working on a Toshiba Satellite PII 233 with RedHat 9 and IceWM.
It took a little work setting up the sound, but everything else worked perfectly. I scavenged a 20gig drive from a dell that had the mb toasted and dug up an ethernet card and a modem, and everything worked great.
No config problems or anything similar and IceWM runs so much quicker than a KDE or Gnome Desktop – perfect for a machine of that age.
——-
!!Danger!! Dissolves Fish
Here me out before before you dismiss it.
I have Gentoo running on several 300 Mhz machines right now. With only 128MB of RAM they are able to handle GNOME pretty well. Not zippy, but usable for students at school who are dumb as rocks and rarely realize that it is not windows.
If you stop all nonessential services and make good use of USE flags you can convert old crappy systems that were running Win98 to a modern Gnome desktop
(Tip: avoid graphicly intensive themes and transparency like the plague if you want PIIs and below to run smooth)
I liked the article with the gentlemen wrote about his GF laptop and I read her take on it and I have to say I agree with her. Damn Small Linux is the only OS I know that will work ok on that kind of laptop and to me Fluxbox is good for a server, but a terriable desktop. DSL is a great OS, but found it pale in comparsion as a funtional desktop such as Windows. Ive got a free 266MHZ pen 2 with 128MB of RAM, 5GB of HDD space. A better system than her Unisys and ive found GNOME or KDE a slow as hell for a desktop choice. Only one Id do is IceVM and im running Libranet. Runs great, but with only 1.6GB of space on hers, I dont think it would work. Personally id rather run BeOS or OS/2 warp than windows 98, but thats me. My take on the matter is my data is very important to me and to be hacked, malwared and flooded with crap, Windows is the last OS id put on any system plugged into the internet. If she never plugs it in, fine, put windows on it and enjoy the blue screens of death. If I couldnt put anything on it but windows, that laptop would meet the graveyard and id use my tax returns to buy an ibook. From this time forward id suggest if anyone wants to use windows, use XP with SP2 otherwise, use something else. Sometimes keeping what you know isnt worth the hassle. Sometimes you’ll never know whats better untill you give it a try, I certainly did and have written articles about the whole experience. Sounds like her boyfriend has been down this road before. Id rather go through a four day install of Gentoo than to go to Windows hell again. Dont use Windows, your data will thank you for it,
I have configured a few sub 200mhz laptops and I have found Redhat 5.2 to be the best OS to install on them. It is quick, feature rich with applications, and perfect for the hardware in the older machines. I would suspect any distro with 2.2 kernel and KDE 1.x would work well. It is the reason I keep my old Redhat powertools Cd’s
Jim
Redhat 6.2 runs very well on old laptops also.
I had an old dell xpi 150mhz computer with 48 meg of ram
and it ran okay. Also slackware 9.1 on was pretty good
using xfce.
I use fluxbox on all my machines. Bloated GUI’s are not something I have to deal with. FreeBSD+fluxbox is about as quick as you get.
Heh,why don’t you swap your girlfriend?
These comments are perhaps telling of the greatest dichotomy of the Linux/Open Source desktop movement.
On one hand, there is the desire to spread the gospel of how easy Linux is, how well it works, how accessable it is to even novice users.
On the other hand, there’s the tendancy for some (often the same people as above) to be elitist: Elitist about skills, customizations, choice of distro, etc.
This really comes out when someone points out a problem with Linux desktops. It often comes down to “You’re claim that Linux isn’t as easy as we say it is false because you failed to do x, then y, then compile z/use x distro/configure this setting, etc.” and quickly devolves into a geek ego fest.
with SP2 and all the bells and whistles running on a P3 500 MHz with 256 MB ram. It has a Geforce 2 64 mb grphx card and it runs quiet zippily actually. In fact i think the actual bottleneck is the darn 40 gb hard drive. Good thing I dont use it, it is my little sisters machine and she loves it a lot..go figure. But after she experienced enough misery with 98 crashing on her every 10 seconds, I just went ahead installed XP and I couldnt believe it when the computer just got plain old faster with it!! I was frankly quiet amazed since I thought XP would be a resource hog on older machines but a fast performer on powerful machines. Not the case, i guess XP is a step up when compared to 98….go figure
SP2 killed XP Pro on my P3-650 laptop w/384MB RAM. It was visibly slower. Now I run FreeBSD on it, and it is pretty quick again. SP2 actually rendered my desktop unbootable because my mobo was not supported. After a couple of these things happened, I erased Windows from all my machines. I wonder if I can get a tax write-off if I give all my old Windows software away?
Heck i use my toshiba 300CT everyday as a radio/alarm clock. It is packed with a 133mHz Pentium MMX cpu 1GB hd and 32MB of ram running Debian untable. Its daily workload is a python/gtk alarm clock app /fluxbox / X / remote firefox / helixplayer/ mplayer . I am constaly amazed how well the laptop runs. For example i can watch a streamed.vidx of the simpsons (not full screen and not over 1/2 hour of content) / stream npr w/ mplayer or helixplayer and browse the web .
-best
-greg
Hi guys, you are miss something … the problem isn’t the wm but the applications you use … firefox, mozilla in 64mb ram become unusable (very very slow compared with IE6).I have one laptop with 64MB ram and i try debian, damsmall, freebsd … and i give up!Windows xp works better (and I hate windows like most of you)
It’s a good point about the apps..I’m Still not satified
with firefox 1.0 even on a fast machine(the rendering
of foreign language scripts like Korean is horrible)
You might try DILLO which will run fast but beware
that it is in alpha but is useable for simple
website (like OSnews or slashdot).
Other options include Opera but I can’t vouch for
it’s speed. Galeon and Epiphany are lighter alternatives
which can be installed provided you have the Gnome
libs(full Gnome installation NOT needed) installed
finally there are the console text browsers like lynx:)
For P2P i would install giftd and use giFTcurs
For chess xboard though it kinda of sucks
Enough of these Windows to Linux stories… How about a Linux to Windows story? Or is that just unaceptable in the OS world? Maybe I need to just write one myself…
Why would any sane human beeing who knows their way around linux/*bsd but not windows *want* to go that way unless forced to (boss says so, or *needs* a windows specific application)? Your thinking is completley skewed, because you think like a windows user who decides to give linux a spin, can’t make it work and decides to go go back because linux is crap since it doesn’t work like windows.
I would say that there *is* no linux to windows story since at least 99% of any such attempts very likley would be a -just like this story – a “Windows to Linux and back again” story. VERY few people start out with only knowledge in *NIX and none in Windows.
Get this: Humans are creatures of habit we tend to resist change, this is the major problem for any change no matter if it’s going from windows to a windowmanager or one version of MS-Windows to another. You have to *want* change if there is to be any change for success. The authors gf seems to be a fine specimen of an unethusiastic switcher. Perhaps he should stop pamper it for her and let her deal with all the problems windows brings on her own. I did this with an old box, and the user suddenly found fluxbox much preferable to a bluescreen.
“These comments are perhaps telling of the greatest dichotomy of the Linux/Open Source desktop movement.
On one hand, there is the desire to spread the gospel of how easy Linux is, how well it works, how accessable it is to even novice users.”
Actually it is easy to install, depending on the distribution you use. Some of the larger distro’s only require a few clicks and your done. Some of the lite weight distro’s might get a little more difficult to install. Your blending your points to come up with a warped conclusion. Easy down on the fud.
____________________________________________________________
“On the other hand, there’s the tendancy for some (often the same people as above) to be elitist: Elitist about skills, customizations, choice of distro, etc.”
You mean Elitist attitude, O so when someone offers tips and any sort of assistance, that would equate to being elite. Heck, I guess teachers would be elitiests. I guess that’s why I have been scared from grade school through university. 20 years of abuse tends to make someone bitter. Yes this is sarcasm.
“This really comes out when someone points out a problem with Linux desktops. It often comes down to “You’re claim that Linux isn’t as easy as we say it is false because you failed to do x, then y, then compile z/use x distro/configure this setting, etc.” and quickly devolves into a geek ego fest.”
Configuring an OS takes time, on any platform same goes for security. It is trimming the services and making good use of the availabe applications. Would you run Doom 3 or UT 2004 on this machine under windows? Even if you could get it installed, it would never run right. So your point is not valid.
Under any platform:
1) Trim the services not being used, this applies to: Windows, Linux, OS X and so on.
2) Use a functional application. If you want ton’s of bells and whistles, then your going to pay on performance. This applies to all OS’.
_____________________________________________________________
If you want full featured, then you want bloat. Bloat slows a machine down under every platform.
Now you can stop trolling. Most people decided not to respond to your remarks. However, I felt the need to dismantle your statments. Perhaps put your comments into perspective or put your comments “out of perspective”.
_____________________________________________________________
Try harder next time “Tony B (IP: —.nyc.rr.com) “
I use Debian Sarge on an old P166 with 64mb ram. Using xfce4 and Opera, it works quite well. At least faster than win98 (after all updates). I have to say, Opera is so much much faster than Firefox on that old hardware.
On my father’s old notebook (Thinkpad 133 MHz, 24 Mb, 1.6 Gb, internal CD, no network or modem) I put on BeOS R5 and it is working very well. When I’ll find a compatible PCMCIA Ethernet card and a 32 Mb EDO SODIMM I’ll try the newest Firefox builds, it is very fast now on BeOS.
Anyone got any recommendations for what OS to install on a Powerbook G3 / 400 MHz? I need an OS with a decent, standards compatible browser and good multimedia abilities.
It’s pretty short on RAM now (64 MB), but I’m giong to upgrade to 128 MB.
So far, i’ve thought about Ubuntu with IceWM or probably XFCE. IIRC, BeOS 5/PPC only runs on pre-G3 Macintoshes.
I have IBM240 400Mhz with 198 MB Ram and I’m thinking about swithcing from win98 to linux. Do you think I will be able to run smouthly Gnome 2._ or XFCE 4.2 ?
I have PB G3 233mhz with 192 megs of RAM. OS 9 is very snappy, but it is OS 9. Debian ran OK. I’m now running OS X using Xpostfacto. It is a touch slow, but very usable.
It won’t be lighting fast, but still very usable altogether since you have got a lot of RAM in that machine (that is, considering it is an old machine). You can run Firefox or OpenOffice without swapping. I would recommend the GNOME 2.10 Beta, or wait for the final version, since the GNOME developers are currently working on reducing the memory usage.
Thanks! So the only real issue for Linux or OS X is my lack of RAM. Guess I’ll have to save a few €€€ for that then…
Have anyone tried xpde (http://www.xpde.com/) ?
It is a Windows XP clone. Maybe it is worth a try ?
To be honest i think windows does run better on many old
laptops. I run linux on my desktop computers, but my wife’s
very old slow laptop runs great with win/95. And really
c’mon a 650mhz 384meg laptop is able to run anything you want,
it does’nt compare to a 150m 48meg laptop and if i could get64meg on it, i would run win xp on it.on many of the really
old laptops you cant change the sound card or the video card
so just for the sake of running bsd or linux, the old…
laptop runs with no sound and in some computers no GUI.
My oldest laptop thats still in a usable state battery wise is a 266Mhz Thinkpad 600, 192MB RAM, 20GB HDD, 2MB NeoMagic graphics card
Its running XP. XPSP2.
Once you get over the boot hump – around 9 minutes cold, it runs well. OpenOffice 1.9.x builds, Firefox + Thunderbird all work well on it, my wireless card has decent support and is supported without NDIS in netstumbler. APM works properly – I can suspend or turn the screen off without a 1-in-4 chance of the OS dying
I used to have Slackware on it, and KDE was unusably slow. GNOME was barely better. Sure, I could have run just a WM, but if that was the case, Windows actually provides a better daily usage experience.
“I used to have Slackware on it, and KDE was unusably slow. GNOME was barely better. Sure, I could have run just a WM, but if that was the case, Windows actually provides a better daily usage experience.”
I agree, I will not use linux on a OLD–LAPTOP–COMPUTER that runs better with windows, just for the sake of running linux.
I am surprised that noone has mentioned 98lite (litepc.com). Until a bit over a year ago I used as my main machine a similarly-specced PC (200 MHz, 64MB RAM) except with somewhat more HDD space (4.3 GB) to play with. If not for 98lite with the Win95 Explorer shell option I would have run out of patience with the old clunker years earlier. Even using Win98SE you should be able to keep the %Windows% directory to well under 200MB, which at least leaves some room to play with.
“Now you can stop trolling. Most people decided not to respond to your remarks. However, I felt the need to dismantle your statments. Perhaps put your comments into perspective or put your comments “out of perspective”.”
< dual-boots XP with SUSE
My previous notebook was an Armada P2 266 with 192 meg of ram. It ran Gentoo just fine, in fact well enough to watch full screen .avi’s streaming from a network share. The WM was usually fluxbox. This guy didn’t know enoug to get the job done right, which is fine right up to the point this lack of knowledge is presented to the public as an OS flaw.
Most people here are so busy trying different OSes that they do not realize that simple Win XP SP2 install is just good enough. And why try WinXP? Because it just works. I have noname laptop Pentium 233Mhz MMX with 256 MB of memory and 2GB HDD. Non of the Linux installation I tried was able to install either due to lack of space (after install) or due to no support for my PCMCIA network card or the LCD panel didn’t work. Then I installed WInXP SP2. The key was to go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Performance and select Adjust for best performance. The eye candy was gone but the performance is now just awesome for browsing and serving as terminal. I believe most nontech people would just not able to figure out how to install Linux on such machine because it requires lots of adjustments (e.g. how to setup compressed file system, since the 2GB is very limited). WinXP is the only way to go for most users and these machines (I run Linux on other machines) since it is so simple and everything they need is just a checkbox away.
WinXP with firewall + virus scanner + spyware brought the Laptop I was working on to a hault, I tried it. Explorer was sooooo slow I wanted to wind it up! 98SE wasn’t so bad, but again suffered from all the additional “protection” you need for M$ products these days. MEPIS in comparison either didn’t need these things or had more efficient replacements built-in.
Konqueror worked much better than I’d expected on KDE 3.2, and I’m keen to try out 3.3 and/or Gnome 2.6+ because I know both Gnome and KDE teams have made further optimisations since KDE 3.2, for me on the Thinkpad it was nearly as responsive as Fluxbox (with the apps I was using).
Go try it for yourself, it’s no trouble to format a partion and install one of the debian or slack distributions afterall. If you don’t like it simply revert back to M$, simple as that.
As for other folks commenting on “having no time” for people trying to run distributions on old hardware, I’d ask you to keep in mind efficiency, just as most of the desktop teams are well aware of the current wastefulness of their respective projects and are attempting to do something about it. I personally found the article on OS news which linked to the guy from Novell, exploring the need for tighter memory controls, most compelling.
Also keep in mind – Linux is a free OS, it’s intended to be used without prejudice and throughout the world by people whos weekly wage is a fraction of yours and mine.
FreeBSD (no X) with links, vim, irssi, etc all work great for my old lappy!
No point in over doing it with eye candy when a simple interface can get the same work done.
How’s about explaining to people who try to use ancient laptops as their primary machine that it simply isn’t going to work?
I had a client who wanted me to install Comcast Cable Net access on his ancient Toshiba with 32MB of RAM. Gimme a break. Comcast requires at LEAST 64MB or it won’t install.
So somebody takes an old laptop and tries to run a modern Linux on it? And then compares it to Windows 98? What’s the point? Windows 98 is garbage. Period.
I have an old Compaq Deskpro 4000 as my second machine which I upgraded to 256MB of RAM and an Evergreen Technologies 400MHz AMD K6 CPU upgrade. It runs Windows 98 and Red Hat 7.0 (nothing later than Red Hat 7.0 will install due to some weirdness with the Maxtor hard drive and the Compaq BIOS). Runs both of them fine. Is Windows 98 more polished than Red Hat 7.0? Depends on your perspective. The desktop is more polished because Konqueror on RH 7.0 tends to crash. Of course, EVERYTHING on Windows 98 tends to crash. Beyond that, I see little difference – except in reliability, security, and the tons of apps installed by default with Linux.
Comparing Windows 98 to Linux on older hardware is pointless. Windows 98 was DOS with a GUI on it – the only difference between it and Windows 95 is 98 was mostly 32-bit code. Linux as an OS even back in 1998 was FAR more sophisticated an OS than Windows 98. Of course it’s going to be harder to run it on old hardware – UNLESS you take the time to strip down the OS – remove unnecessary services, recompile the kernel for the hardware, etc. And once you’ve done that, what’s the point of comparing it to an ALREADY stripped-down OS like Windows 98?
As for trying to install Linux with a window manager only and then getting a new user to compare it to a full desktop, what’s the point? A window manager is not a full desktop? Duh!
The idiot who wrote the the article is clueless about hardware, Linux, Windows 98 – and women…
The sole point of this article is to demonstrate what NOT to do when trying to get a new user to use Linux.
And his girlfriend sounds like a bitch – dump her…
WinXP with firewall + virus scanner + spyware brought the Laptop I was working on to a hault, I tried it. Explorer was sooooo slow I wanted to wind it up! 98SE wasn’t so bad, but again suffered from all the additional “protection” you need for M$ products these days. MEPIS in comparison either didn’t need these things or had more efficient replacements built-in.
That’s very true. For older computers, XP will run on them fine. But in order to protect an XP install enough to let it on the internet, you have to run so much extra software-to block viruses, spyware- that the computer is rendered unusable. This wouldn’t be a problem if companies a made programs for XP allowed you to run in limited user mode (like most programs do in Linux), as then spyware and viruses could wreck havoc. But for some reason XP software producers refuse to put out a safer product (why do I need to be an admin to run quicken or a media player for cripes sakes). So my old laptop will stay with it Ubuntu.
I have an old laptop here, Toshiba Satellite (AMD K6-II 380 MHz, 160 MB ram and 4.3G HDD). It runs FC3 w/ GNOME, OO.org, GIMP, Firefox and Mplayer. Not snappy but usable.
Lets face facts, most old 133 to 150 mhz 24-48 laptops wont
run suse 9x, mandrake 9-10 or any bloated linux distro
with gnome or kde. instead of saying facts as they are
you call people trolls, well i use linux on my old desktops
just fine, Linux is to be used not worshiped!!!!
Well not any with a desktop manager anyway. Win98 won’t even install on my laptop but I got KDE to run ( wait maybe that shouldn’t be “run” more like crawl through thick goop ). It is a 486DX2/66 with 24MB ram and no CD-Drive. It can only do 256 colours at 640×480 or is that 16 colours. The only thing I can get it to run decently is Windows 3.11
Why is is that everyone and their dog makes a distro but no-one makes a good one with a UI for older machines?
I have here a laptop (pent 100, 16MB, 1GB) which runs FreeBSD (completely trimmed kernel and i586mmx-optimized userland) even with X. It’s _barely_ usable with FluxBox and AbiWord as a word processor. I installed this one years ago for my girlfriend and she used it very effectively. Only she didn’t have the illusion that the machine was anything more than a glorified electrical typewriter. I made that very clear from the start so she wouldn’t have her expectations raised too high. She uses a fully loaded Gnome desktop (Debian) at home to full satisfaction on an Athlon 1100/384MB/10GB. The only reason I wiped the Win95 from the laptop was stability. Win95 crashed all the time. FreeBSD has yet to let her down once, and it’s been years.
It has to be said, she only uses this laptop for writing articles while on the road and nothing else. Not even the internet (no connections for it other than a clunky RS232 port that usually has an external mouse in it).
Ok, let’s get to the oldest
Arche 386 sx33 w/o 387, 6mb of RAM, 120mb hdd, 3’5 floppy, lpt, single com port and 640×480 screen. It was running DOS. I did not want to ditch it, as the hardware works exceptionally well (even on battery!).
Of course I wanted smth. better than DOS. Windows 3.1 worked, but I never wanted to use it. Any modern linux or fbsd just refused to even install. FreeBSD 2.2.7 did the trick (I still have cd’s handy), but was painfully slow even w/o X. Same with old slackware. And the winner is – of course!, my once-favourite OS/2 Warp 3 Russian. Installation was a breeze, I installed on FAT to conserve memory and be able to dual-boot with dos, I ditched WIN/OS2 and dos compatibility, and as the result:
>80 megs of free hdd space with DOS and OS/2 installed, OS/2 with protectonly and some unneeded stuff removed running surprisingly fast – I still want to see any modern linux GUI comparable in power to WPS. Dual-booting with IBM PC-DOS (some games like civilization).
2 Author – maybe you should look at OS/2 3.x, 4.x or eCS? They should be dirt cheap on ebay now, and should run very fast on the hardware you describe…
I remember OS/2 fondly from the 2.x days and Warp 3. I bought Warp back in the day (1995 if I recall correctly) but I got rid of it sometime later when my PC got powerful enough to properly run Windows NT and Linux with X. Too bad, it is indeed awesome on older hardware.
It’s amazing to see how OS’es tend to inflat together with the hardware specs. I’m typing this from a dual G5 Mac, wondering why on earth I need that huge capacity just for DTP. I made complete magazines on machines on 486DX2’s and early Pentiums in the day. Admitted, it’s great that I don’t have to be as careful about disk space and RAM usage anymore.. but still, the G5 doesn’t give me much USEFUL added functionality. Sure lots of eye candy, but the wow-factor of OSX wears off soon. I’d have no problem whatsoever going back to my trusty old Pentium II, that’s sitting in the corner right now doing nothing but parsing Postscript and feeding the result to a bunch of printers. At least I didn’t have to scrap it 🙂
“Anyone got any recommendations for what OS to install on a Powerbook G3 / 400 MHz? I need an OS with a decent, standards compatible browser and good multimedia abilities.
It’s pretty short on RAM now (64 MB), but I’m giong to upgrade to 128 MB.
So far, i’ve thought about Ubuntu with IceWM or probably XFCE. IIRC, BeOS 5/PPC only runs on pre-G3 Macintoshes.”
I have a Lombard and have installed Mandrake 10.1, YellowDog 4.0, and Ubuntu Warty and out of the three I enjoyed using Ubuntu the best. Mandrake has a bug with PCMCIA and could not get my PCMCIA wireless to work. Yellowdog was really buggy and crashed alot. Ubuntu runs really well on it. I reccomend giving Ubuntu a go. Everything works and is very slick and light.
Jim
Desktop: AMD 486, 120 MHz, 16 MB RAM, S3 trio 1MB, IDE HDD 340 MB
Runs: OpenLinux Lite
Desktop/GUI: KDE 1.1.1
You’d be surprised what a wealth of apps this distro contains.
Fileserver: Intel 486 66 MHz, 32 MB RAM, Cirrus Logic, HDD 3 X 1GB SCSI2
Runs: Slackware 7.1
Desktop: n/a
This machine will work forever.
For comparison purposes, my first PC ever:
Intel 486 33 MHz, 4 MB RAM, Trident VGA 1 MB HDD IDE 81 MB
Was running: MS DOS 5.0/Win 3.1
Believe it or not, I did my whole graduation thesis research AND writing/editing/illustration on that one.
PSPICE for DOS and OrCAD for DOS were my workhorse apps on that one. Word 6.0 and CorelDraw were the editing/writing and illustration apps. To this day, WOrd 6.0 has all I ever needed from a wordprocessor. That means, a 486 33 MHz is all I need for all my wordprocessing needs! Now think about it for a second….
How about this for old…
486SX 25Mhz, 4Mb Memory, 1.44Floppy, 80Mb Hard Disk. Tiny 640×480 grayscale screen. Dead battery. Found a Slackware 2.0 (Kernel 1.0.9) distro on an old magazine cover disk and installed it from multiple floppy disks with no problems at all.
Took this on holiday with me last year to type up some notes & web pages. Used joe, lynx/links and tar/gzip to transfer the data via floppy disk.
I hadda throw this in: QNX for those old boxes. The QNX demo floppy will get you on the net with a gui running an 386 and 4MB ram.
As for all the machines running XP SP2 128MB+: Of course, winxp will still be a great choice. But give it 64MB and watch it choke.
The EOL of Win9x makes it absolutely nuts to install any 9x OS and connect it.
I’ve learned long ago to NOT mess with my gf’s computers under any circumstance. The answer is that if anything will go wrong, (it is probably not even my fault) that there will be a negative association with me.
If there HAS to be work done, consider getting her a new ride than get her old archaic POS up to speed. LOL
Vector Linux 5.0 is a complete system with OO, Scribus, Abiword, etc. and a selection of browsers and a ton of other stuff. You can use either KDE or IceWM. They both look great, and IceWM is very snappy even on an old Pentiun 233. The full install takes just over 2gb.
PII 450MHz, 128MB RAM, 4GB HDD (dell cpi-r).
installed with a debian net-install cd. after it was done, 230MB had been consumed on the hard drive and I had a functional system.
upgraded to unstable, installed X and openbox, and I had a GUI. approx. 300MB used on the HDD. 300MB INCLUDING all the binary packages I had downloaded.
everything works on the laptop, and the xircom ethernet/modem pcmcia card was recognized at install.
after cleaning out running services (there werent many to clean out since I hadnt installed what I didnt need), it is a little sluggish when loading apps and thats about it.
win2k also ran perfectly well on this machine, but i prefer debian over that now =]
I have a P200, 92 MB RAM (recently upgraded from 64MB), and Linux support for it sucks really bad. Moreover, it takes TOO long to make a successful install i.e. there is no visible light at the end of the tunnel, and my time is worth more than that.
I gave in, installed windows XP, stripped out all crap using XPLite, put it into hibernation, and I wake it up whenever I need it, without needing to reboot. only thing is that the older hard disk is much noisier than newer ones.
I have a P200, 92 MB RAM (recently upgraded from 64MB), and Linux support for it sucks really bad. Moreover, it takes TOO long to make a successful install i.e. there is no light visible at the end of the tunnel, and my time is worth more than that.
I gave in, installed windows XP, stripped out all crap using XPLite, put it into hibernation, and I wake it up whenever I need it, without needing to reboot. Only thing is that the older hard disk is much noisier than any newer ones.
getting BeOS5 to actually work on these things is a crapshoot at best,and I have yet to find a laptop that just does everything,onr of the best I have found so far is the thinkpad 600E but it had some serious issues with pcmcia and the internal modem doesnt work,granted it runs way faster than linux or windows on this machine and makes a nice 2nd OS on it for audio editing and such,it just lackes too much functionality to stand alone,My take on this is to grab an old liscenced copy of win95 somewhere and run it on these old pentium I laptops you can get it pretty cheap anymore because it’s no longer supported by M$,and maybe if you can find an old copy of new deal or Geos laying around throw that on there too, because realisticly because I don’t see anything better rthan Ice WM running on there under Linux and other than the different skins it’s pretty win95ish looking anyways,now on the other hand I have a PIII 600 jetbook laptop running Mepis Linux and it just works and runs better than WinXP on the same,But BeOS is a poor choice for someone thats not buying their laptop with BeOS in mind,the hardware support is too lame!
Your video card probably wasn’t upported. Did you bother to check and see? Might have been running in VESA mode. hence the slowness.. I have run beos on a p75/64mb and it was zippy.
I had it on a pentium pro 200 with 32mb of ram and it ran fine so it probably was your video card.
I’m using a P120/144MB/4GB Toshiba laptop with Debian testing. With IceWM environment and the Opera browser, it’s really not too bad at all.