I know that there are many gnu/linux distributions which can no longer even be installed on very old computers because of their size and/or distribution method; can you recommend any of the 100% free distributions for this purpose?
Depends on how you define "old". On a 10 year old system (say, a Pentium II with 128 mb of ram) you can easily run the current version of Debian even with the not bad-looking LXDE gui.
Gentoo Linux should also be able to run on pretty old machines (but I think it woud be a pain in the a** to compile it)
DSL (damn small linux) is also aimed at very old computers, I don't know, however, if it's 100% free.
In general it might be worthwhile to take a look at distributions for embedded linux, they often have clever solutions when it comes to limited resources.
Michael
2009/11/3 Michael G lists.n.forums@googlemail.com:
I know that there are many gnu/linux distributions which can no longer even be installed on very old computers because of their size and/or distribution method; can you recommend any of the 100% free distributions for this purpose?
Depends on how you define "old". On a 10 year old system (say, a Pentium II with 128 mb of ram) you can easily run the current version of Debian even with the not bad-looking LXDE gui.
In my experience, the sticking point is not CPU, even a P-II does fine - it's memory. KDE or GNOME are going to be a world of pain in 256MB, you want at least 512MB and preferably as absolutely much as will physically fit (typically 1024MB on motherboards of the time). A smaller DE would of course be better.
As a practical usable machine, the main problem I find is that Firefox is way too fat these days.
If you don't want a web browser, your life is much easier with memory. I was recently using an ancient Thinkpad 560X as the household server - Pentium MMX 233MHz (not P-II, original Pentium), 96MB memory and Debian squeeze in command-line mode, no X at all. It served the contents of a large USB disk over SMB and recorded sound from the USB turntable and the cassette deck hooked to it quite well.
- d.
Am Dienstag, dem 03. Nov 2009 schrieb David Gerard:
In my experience, the sticking point is not CPU, even a P-II does fine
- it's memory. KDE or GNOME are going to be a world of pain in 256MB,
you want at least 512MB and preferably as absolutely much as will physically fit (typically 1024MB on motherboards of the time). A smaller DE would of course be better.
The environment LXDE looks good: http://lxde.org/
As a practical usable machine, the main problem I find is that Firefox is way too fat these days.
Midori is fine: http://www.twotoasts.de/index.php?/pages/midori_summary.html