Suse on an old machine

[fritz the cat]

I have an old machine, runs at 99/100 Mhz. Will Suse run OK with this slow of a processer?

[JimH]

Suse won't for sure. Especially a recent version.

Debian would run on it, but X would probably be out of the question. Even with a lightweight window manager it would not run very well.

How much memory does this machine have?

Jim H

[trommaster]

i had rh 6.2 running with X on a p100 with 32mb of ram.
old versions of kde/gnome worked, but i would reccomend using something lighter, like xfce, {flux|black}box or rox

[fritz the cat]

Intel CPU is marked 90 Mhz, but it tests at 99/100, depending upon which program I test it on. RAM is 128 MgBytes, max this machine will hold. Tried to upgrade processor, but no go, stuck right where it's at. If you guys can point me to a linux that will work on this machine, I sure would appriciate it.
Thanks.

[Spot]

Since you're obviously using older hardware, you might as well go with a 2.2.x kernel, since you won't need all the advanced features/modules of the later(2.4.x) kernels, nor the bloat.

Debian(http://www.debian.org) stable(Potato), testing(Woody), and unstable(Sid) all start with a 2.2.x kernel and can be installed to a 386/16 meg ram machine without too many problems. Woody is quite mature now, and the packages for it are rock solid.
Don't expect to have your hand held as much for the install as you would with Suse, Redhat, or Mandrake though. Debian's documentation is suberb - use it to your advantage.

Since you do have a more than decent amount of ram, XFree86 should run ok with a light window manager like black/fluxbox, or one of the other lightweights - by lightweight I don't mean light on features, I mean light on resource usage. Still, don't expect to win any speed contests.

You've got yourself a really decent startup/learning machine there. If you concentrate more on command line features, you'll make the most of what you've got that way.

[JimH]

Debian. Slackware maybe. Aaron or Skynet should be able to provide an opinion on how well Slackware would run. They both use Slack.

Jim H

[Aaron_Adams]

Hi fritz,

Slackware should run fine on your laptop. As i've mentioned elsewhere on the forums, I've got a P150mhz Laptop with 32megs of ram, running Slackware 8, Fluxbox, Opera, Sylpheed, etc. And it runs mighty quick considering.

My recommendation would be to use the 2.2.x kernel as mentioned above. If you install Slackware 8 instead of Slackware 8.1 you have the option to pick 2.2.19 instead of 2.4.5. Also I'd recommend on doing a bare minimum install, to guarantee no bloat, and install additional packages when needed. Rather then doing an installation of extra packages you "think" you might need in the future.

As far as minimum requirements for slackware goes, I quote from their site

386 processor
16MB RAM
50 megabytes of hard disk space
3.5" floppy drive

Additional hardware may be needed if you want to run the X Window System at a usable speed or if you want network capabilities.

Good Luck.

[fritz the cat]

Thanks for all the help guys, I think I have enough info now to get started. btw, it's not a laptop that I have, when I said old machine, I ment OLD MACHINE !!! LOL! It's a desktop, circa 1995, AT&T Globalyst 600. It's my first computer, given to me by a friend last December. I've been messing around inside it and have learned quite alot in the last 7 1/2 months, and I think I'm ready to make the next step and go Linux. The more I learn, the more I don't like Microsoft. Again, thanks for all the help.

[trommaster]

The more I learn, the more I don't like Microsoft.

;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

[Aaron_Adams]

The only reason why I was saying laptop is because my mind was wondering due to thinking about my laptop. lol!