Hi!
Someone asked me to revive their 20 year old laptop as its no longer working on their installation of windows XP.
This baby has around 512MB of Ram, 1.6 GHZ Intel Atom.
This is my first time doing something with hardware older than myself so I’d love some insight from people around.
Tiny Core
It’s a 32-bit CPU afaik. Sadly Debian Trixie doesn’t support 32-bit anymore. Old stable Debian Bookworm would be a good option.
Maybe SliTaz? https://www.slitaz.org/en/
Arch Linux 32-bit? https://archlinux32.org/
MX Linux.
It can run in in pretty much all hardware, and it’s debian-based too! It has Libreoffice, Firefox, etc. by default.Heck; if you can’t install it, you can just use is persistently from the USB!
RAM will be an issue if they want a Desktop Environment. It would be good to find out max RAM that machine supported and purchase a replacement stick.
If you can get at least 2gig you might have an OK platform.
If you can’t increase RAM then there is a cool project called HaikuOS that is super lightweight, they have some popular packages for it, butitd is not a Linux distro with tons of availabe apps. Its got a late 90s feel to it.
MX Linux, AntiX, Puppy Linux?
+1 for antiX. Although make sure to disable all locales you don’t need or you will be in for a looooong ride when updating on an old machine.
Puppy Linux might be an option if that project is still going.
One thing you could try is Alpine Linux It is surprisingly lightweight, and pair it with something like OpenBox or maybe XFCE, and it might be quite good
Cute!!
Have you considered freeDOS? Would run rral snappy on there. Im doing that with my p3 64mb ram gateway.
Do you have a NIC that accepts DOS-based drivers or are you surviving without internet on it?
I dont use it on the web. It couldn’t load any sites anyways.
Justin Bieber OS. Biebian > Debian
512MB of ram? you could probably just run a command line terminal and call it a day. good luck, soldier. bringing that old warhorse back to life is a noble quest.
Just installed MiniOS on my 15 year old Dell Ultrabook. Small, fast and light.
512MB of Ram
Arch does technically „„run”” on it™
Otherwise regarding the CPU, I would set up a gentoo with distcc on it, since you dont be daily driving the thing anyways
There was recently another user asking the same for a similar machine on the .ml Linux comm.
As I did there, I can only tell you I successfully ran antix on a similarly old eee-pc from 2007ish, with the same CPU. It did have 1gb of ram though iirc, but the distro ran fairly comfortably (until it came to browsing with many tabs open).
I would usually recommend Linux Mint, but damn that thing belongs in a museum!
Hell, why not put an antique OS like Windows XP for that antique piece of beauty?
It’s running windows XP but it’s currently unable to use any browsers as the user wants to use it for
I’m afraid you’re really shit outta luck as even Firefox is killing 32-bit.
You could prolly find someone who’s kept some old versions of 32-bit FF, but using them on -today’s- network with old-time security? Whoof. As for the OS, some older XFCE’s WILL work OK w 500MB, but you’ll be waiting on disk-swap a lot, and SSD options will be limited.
but using them on -today’s- network with old-time security?
This has always been the main issue with older software, hasn’t it?
LOL! Well, always is a long time, but not so much until the internet came along! And there are older versions of FF extensions like UBlockO still floating around out there. And it depends on what types of sites the user will be visiting.
Void Linux?
