What's a good distro for old computers?

[Tsuroerusu]

I hi-jacked my mum's old 486 PC, it was actually mine before I got my newer machine, which she hasn't used for a long time, and it has crab software, Windows 98, on it and I really enjoy slaughtering Windows these days, and boy has this Windows pissed me off in the past.

It's a 400 MHz, I threw in 256 MB RAM from my own box of stuff, so an X session won't be like a 5 ton process to carry.

What would be a good Linux distro for this old friend of mine? I plan on using XFCE, which is my prefered light weight desktop, and pretty much do a little desktop machine to play around with and test stuff on...

[Patrick]

I'd go with Damn Small:
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

It uses a real nice customized version of fluxbox and it's damn small!

[Tsuroerusu]

I'd go with Damn Small:
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

It uses a real nice customized version of fluxbox and it's damn small!

Cool, by the way how would Slackware do for this task? I've actually never tried it, plus after listening to TLLTS I heard lots of good things about it, now multiply that a thousand times

[Patrick]

Cool, by the way how would Slackware do for this task? I've actually never tried it, plus after listening to TLLTS I heard lots of good things about it, now multiply that a thousand times

Slackware is always good. There's also Vector which is like Slackware light:
http://www.vectorlinux.com/

It comes with IceWM.

[Jza]

Puppy Linux is a more slimer distro than DamnSmall Linux, why? because it aims at destroying windows 95

http://www.puppylinux.org

[Tsuroerusu]

Thanks for your suggestions guys, just finished wiping Windows 98 and doing a very very low level surface analysis with a program called SpinRite (Pat you might know about this since you've been watching The Screen Savers) to check how this old-ass IBM drive was doing. I've decided to go with Slackware for this

[treehead]

Thanks for your suggestions guys, just finished wiping Windows 98 and doing a very very low level surface analysis with a program called SpinRite (Pat you might know about this since you've been watching The Screen Savers) to check how this old-ass IBM drive was doing. I've decided to go with Slackware for this :wink:

;tsuro, let us know how this install works out, will you? i'm sure we'd all be interested in how slack fares on that 486.

;treehead

[Tsuroerusu]

Thanks for your suggestions guys, just finished wiping Windows 98 and doing a very very low level surface analysis with a program called SpinRite (Pat you might know about this since you've been watching The Screen Savers) to check how this old-ass IBM drive was doing. I've decided to go with Slackware for this

;tsuro, let us know how this install works out, will you? i'm sure we'd all be interested in how slack fares on that 486.

;treehead

OK here goes!

I just spent the entire day playing with different OSes on this old PC (400 MHz AMD K6, 256 MB RAM, 8 GB Hard-drive), since the motherboard has a VIA chipset on it, it worked flawlessly with Slackware, no drivers at all needed to be loaded manually, it had it all right out of the box. Performance was pretty good, and VERY good compared to Windows 98.
Now I've only tried Slackware a few times before, and I must that this just isn't the distribution for me at this time, it might be someday during christmas or the winter if I decide to do a Linus Torvalds-style winter vacation and just sit in my room with a few pretzel cakes, and hack away... anyway, I must say that even though the dependency issues that often occour on RPM based systems, do piss me off, I just can't seem to figure Slackware out without it

So what I did after playing with Slackware for five hours straight, I downloaded the boot floppy image for OpenBSD and loaded it onto the machine and now this was good stuff.
"NetBSD... BSD rocks!" (Thanks to Linc for that quote), I acutally timed it and it booted up faster than Slackware, which actually impressed me quite a lot, I also decided to give FreeBSD a whirl on this oldie, just to see how it ran, and it ran awesome as well.

Is it just me or does VIA chipsets just work pretty damn well on free software operating systems? (Yes I know they've open sourced a lot of drivers, but it still impresses me a lot)

After playing with Slackware Linux, OpenBSD and FreeBSD I think I'm actually gonna go with FreeBSD, because I really like the ports system, and no I'm NOT doing this stuff Gentoo-style (Darn that could be misunderstood, now anyway), one thing I REALLY love about FreeBSD's ports system is that if there is a name mismatch in the dependency stuff you can actually edit it so say you have an error saying "mlayer" instead of the corrent "mplayer" you can add the p and then there are no dependency hell. I don't understand why the Debian people have done this years ago.

[snarkout]

sit in my room with a few pretzel cakes

WTF is a pretzel cake?

[snarkout]

Pretzel Cake

Ingredients

2 cups chopped pretzels
2 sticks (1 cup) butter or margarine
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 8 oz. container whipped topping
1 8 oz. package cream cheese, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 can cherry pie filling
Instructions

In a medium bowl, mix together pretzels, butter and sugar. Press down into a greased 13 x 9-inch baking pan.

Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes. Cool before adding toppings.

Topping:
Beat together whipped topping, cream cheese and vanilla. Spread on cooled pretzels in pan. Refrigerate until cheese mixture is set, then pour over cherry pie filling.

Keep refrigerated

You'd think the CIA would have learned me about those (hint: think food, not spook). Anyhow, that sounds like a pretty sweetass vacation to me.

[Tsuroerusu]

Pretzel Cake

Ingredients

2 cups chopped pretzels
2 sticks (1 cup) butter or margarine
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 8 oz. container whipped topping
1 8 oz. package cream cheese, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 can cherry pie filling
Instructions

In a medium bowl, mix together pretzels, butter and sugar. Press down into a greased 13 x 9-inch baking pan.

Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes. Cool before adding toppings.

Topping:
Beat together whipped topping, cream cheese and vanilla. Spread on cooled pretzels in pan. Refrigerate until cheese mixture is set, then pour over cherry pie filling.

Keep refrigerated

You'd think the CIA would have learned me about those (hint: think food, not spook). Anyhow, that sounds like a pretty sweetass vacation to me.

That's not exactly what I was thinking about but basicly I couldn't find an english word for what I actually meant so I needed to use something close to it. I've read Linus' book called "Just For Fun" and he describes a lot of situation sitting in his room and just hackin' away, the kind of "cake" I was refering is a kind of salty, dry kind of cookie. Doesn't sound very good, but if you have a good christmas beer at hand, it's actually quite nice.

[snarkout]

That's more like what I pictured. That actually sounds better, especially the Christmas Beer part.

[Tsuroerusu]

That's more like what I pictured. That actually sounds better, especially the Christmas Beer part.

Hehe, you bet, imagine a christmas tree in the living room, and you sittin' in your room hackin' da Slack
Now that's what I like about christmas!

[snarkout]

Just out of curiosity, what's the actual name of the cookie you were describing? My curiosity is piqued!

[Tsuroerusu]

Just out of curiosity, what's the actual name of the cookie you were describing? My curiosity is piqued!

I don't know if even has a name in english in danish it's called a "saltkringle".

salt means salt, which you might be able to guess, "kringle" means "pretzel cake" so you probably could call it a "salt pretzel cake".

If you ever come to Denmark, I'll be happy to show you what it is