How low can you go? An still run linux..

[tino]

How low?

Great article although it does miss out a few small distro's, vector springs to mind. Although that is a Slackware derivitive, maybe not everyone's cup of tea.

Im going to try and boot DSL on my parents old old pc from 1997 I think it was, it has been running as a firewall but this seems a good reason to have a play with it. Has anyone else given DSL a try? It seems to be a decent distro that you can add items to if you have the space.

[No_Strings]

I have not tried DSL, but there are several simple things a Linux user can do to make things run faster on an old PC.

* Disable any unneeded services.  This is good practice regardless of whether you want a zippier machine since it also limits vulnerabilities.

* Blacklist unneeded modules.  Save that memory space for other things.

* Compile a custom kernel.  If you optimize for your platform and remove things you'll never use, you will boot and run (slightly) faster and free up some memory.

* Run a lightweight DE.  The biggest resource hogs on your system are applications, X and the desktop.  All of those semi-transparent goodies, weather applets, reminders and blinkenlietz come at a price.

Since drive space is so cheap, I don't worry too much about how small I can make my install.  If I were building a router or something like that, it would be a different story.

[MrbLOB9000]

that computer would run Windows XP decently as well...  Hell, we were running a K6-2 500MHz with 256MB of ram as a point of sale machine at the shop I work at and it worked just fine on windows XP as well.  It wasn't a speed demon, but it worked just fine.

[tino]

There is a difference between working and it working comfortably.

I know with Windows I would constantly be waiting for it, at least with a stripped version of linux the load would be alot less.

[MrbLOB9000]

as long as you have enough ram for what you're doing, a slow machine with XP works fine and you don't have to resort to a "stripped down version."