Linux on an old puny machine?

[JonnyBoy]

I dug my old laptop out yesterday, it hasn't seen light of day for ages and thought I'd check it still works - which it does, albeit very slowly.

The beast in question is a Toshiba 3440CT, with a PIII 500mhz cpu, 64mb ram and a 6gb hard drive, plus some puny graphics chip with 8mb RAM - S3 Savage IIRC. It's tiny so has no room for any internal drives; I have a USB floppy (bootable) and USB cCD-RW (non-bootable) On the upside, it's very very small and light

At the mo it's struggling to run Windows 2000 and I don't really have any practical use for it, so I might as well use it as a guinea pig to try out Linux

My question is, does anyone know of a version of Linux that will run happily (i.e. better than Win2K currently does) on such a puny computer? Obviously I don't want to throw any money at the laptop to upgrade, but all it'll be used for is web browsing, word processor/spreadsheety stuff (if I can find freebie Linux apps that are compatible with MS Office XP) and, eventually (i.e. when I work out how), to play music from my main PC via wireless network. It has to be a free Linux distro as I'm stingy and must also be easy for someone who's never ever dealt with Linux before to install. Plus whatever I end up using will have to be installed from another partition on the HDD due to the lack of bootable CD drive...

Cheers!

 

[oilrag]

Heres a linux group in your area

http://www.scundog.org/scunforum/


Good luck

 

[hmallett]

My question is, does anyone know of a version of Linux that will run happily (i.e. better than Win2K currently does) on such a puny computer?

Well (practically) any linux distro will run on it. The problem is that you'll want a window manager, and the two most popular ones (KDE and Gnome) like plenty of memory, so don't expect them to be blazingly fast. You could always try and hunt down a lightweight window manager.
FreeBSD is nice too, I prefer it to linux, it feels more polished.
H

 

[4RL]

Well (practically) any linux distro will run on it. The problem is that you'll want a window manager, and the two most popular ones (KDE and Gnome) like plenty of memory, so don't expect them to be blazingly fast. You could always try and hunt down a lightweight window manager.
FreeBSD is nice too, I prefer it to linux, it feels more polished.
H

Or don't both with a window manager

 

[Xen]

mandrake (now AKA mandriva) is imo the best distro for windows users to get used to linux

if you want to try linux without having to install, use a distro called Knoppix. Its not the best distro but its still good nad they do a liveCD version that will run direct from CD with no installation.

If you want raw power, i found SuSe was the most powerful of all the distros ive used but not exactly easy to use.