Question for u linux experts

I have an old IBM X23 Thinkpad. It has a blazing fast 866mhz p3 cpu, a massive 256mb of ram and a huge 20gig hard drive . Its only going to be used for everyday things like browsing, email etc..
I'm wondering what distro of linux would give the best performance on a system with these specs? Thanks!

 

Heh Heh nice box.
Try Puppy, DSL, Absolute for starters.
'Luck

 

I've tried every Major linux distro on my laptop and they all perform well for desktop usage. Its a p3 866mhz with 512mb ram.
An average Gnome install with stuff like open office, firefox and thunderbird running does disk swap with 256mb, but still usable, with 512mb ram things were far quicker.

I would check the distros out and see how they run - try a few live CD's out.

 

Not the distro matters as much as the desktop environment that you use.
Examples of light distro's are: xubuntu, Mepis Antix, zenwalk, SaxenOS, VectorLinux and Wolvix.

(Lightweight distro's)

 

i'd definately get fluxbuntu. it has all the great stuff of ubuntu with the light window manager fluxbox. i love fluxbox and use it on my laptop
http://fluxbuntu.org/

look how many other linux users like it too, so far the thread goes to 49 pages -
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=581033

 

Pretty much any BSD (Net and Open in particular), or Arch Linux should do the trick. They will just give you command line, put it is quite simple and well documented, particularly in arch's (@ http://wiki.archlinux.org ) case, how to get a GUI up and running for you in no time. I would recommend using either Openbox, Pekwm, or Fluxbox for you window manager to keep the memory usage nice and low and I would also recommend Opera instead of firefox. I have a pc that is almost exactly those specs (I have a 1.2 GHz P4 processor and a 40 GB hard drive but same RAM), and the swap space is never touched using Arch, with any of those window managers, and opera. Firefox ist just to slow and consumes too much memory for the 256MB of RAM, and it is very painful to use after a while at those speeds.

Cheers,

Alphalutra1

 

Tack my vote on for Xubuntu or FreeBSD.

 

Another super-light alternative to Fluxbuntu is PCFluxboxOS, which is based on PClinuxOS.

/C.

 

...i run a DSL (aka: Damn Small Linux) on half of my 4Gb bootable flashdrive. And that's how lightweight a Linux can be!

I also had 1copy of Fluxbuntu beside an Ubuntu in my multiboot laptop based on a Siemens AMD64... and PCflux is considered a lightweight.

The thing to consider is your individual 'taste' (aka: preference) of Penguins and how adept were you in modifying distros. Modifications can start from a basic Ubuntu-LTS... or the others mentioned herein. Then trim or add your lightweight versions of bolt-on tools on your foundational Linux.

------------------------------------
EDIT: typos

 

PCLOS runs absolutely fine with KDE on my ancient dual XEON 800 with 512mb RAM.

 

Hello,
For new users, I would suggest Xubuntu.
Mrk

 

I agree that Xubuntu is well suited for a beginner, but I must say I really do like Zenwalk. Aside from the fact that I'm a sucker for Xfce, it really is an impressive distro.

 

Hi iceni, which one is lighter and better, xfce or fluxbox?( in other words Xubutu or fluxbuntu)?

Thanks

 

Fluxbox is only a window manager, Xfce is a complete desktop (window manager + file manager + applications)
Window Manager for X

 

Sorry. That was a dumb Q indeed.

 

There's no need to apologize

 

fluxbox is very light and is really good when someone has already set it up for you, like with fluxbuntu. if you get xubuntu you can install fluxbox too, it's a tiny download, then pick which one to use when you login. but, if you download fluxbox on xubuntu you'll have to configure it, stuff like make the menus, startup programs, configure it so you have an option to use it at login, add icons to the desktop if you want them etc.

fluxbuntu isn't just ubuntu with a different desktop, lots of other things have been changed to make the whole OS light.

 

All great suggestions to the OP. One problem I hear from people "trying Linux" is it runs slow, etc. In almost every case, they burned an iso and ran a LiveCD for their introduction to Linux. That's fine for checking out the distro and what's there, UI, etc. But you can't really get the flavor of a Linux distro without installing it and losing the CD lag. Don't just try LiveCds when you are searching for a distro. Just a thought if you're going to try a few.

 

Thanks iceni!

 

Well i been trying out a few distros over the past few days. I realised i had a few distros on various pc mag cd's. So far i've tried out ubuntu, freespire, mandriva, sabayon and pc-bsd. PC-BSD seems to have run the best so far,however i've yet to try xbuntu and fluxbuntu.

Just a quick question, the default browser in pc-bsd is konqueror, is this just another browser based on firefox or something different? How good is it?

 

All you need to know about Konqueror It works well and is probably best on a system with low (ram) resources.

SeaMonkey is good. Opera is easy to adjust cache levels for that light feeling

I like and use PC-BSD but its biggest downfall on the web is lack of proper Flash 9 support Other than that PC-BSD is nice & fast

VectorLinux
is a faster more complete example of xfce4, its worth a try

Don't forget PCFluxboxOS its pretty nice.

 

Something different. It is a great browser, very light (especially since you already have all the libs loaded since it is running KDE) and fast. I would run it if I used KDE, but I don't so, instead I use Opera which is also good. I don't think firefox would be good for that computer, since although it used to be regarded as a small quick browser, it definitely has grown way beyond that unfortunately.

Cheers,

Alphalutra1

 

If you´re not an "addict" to the KDE desktop, then Solaris have support for Flash Player 9 (Firefox & Mozilla)

/C.

 

I can recommend Dreamlinux, runs much lighter on my old laptop than xubuntu and looks beautiful.

 

Well i've been trying fluxbuntu. It runs nicely once its loaded, however it takes forever to load. I didn't time it but it had to be close to 5 minutes which is way too long imo. Tried xubuntu but it froze up and started making a beeping noise when attempting to configure the hardware.

The search continues...