Netw0rk_Man1ac Posted November 24, 2012 Share Posted November 24, 2012 (edited) I have an old laptop that I'm wanting to put linux on to play with and get more comfortable with the OS. The problem I've found is that the specs on the system are so low that it's hard to find a good distro that is meant to be installed to the HDD. I've tried DSL and while it runs pretty quick it seems to have a problem installing to disk and the same with Lubuntu. Does anyone have any suggestions? The Current specs on the systems are as follows: 30 GB HDD 2.2 GHz Celeron (single core) 256 MB RAM I can't afford to get any new RAM for the system which only maxes out at 512 MB anyway. The hard drive is currently bare. Any thoughts would be great. Edited November 24, 2012 by Netw0rk_Man1ac Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr-Protocol Posted November 24, 2012 Share Posted November 24, 2012 That is going to be rough. Do you have a more updated system besides your "old laptop" that you could run a virtual machine on? That way you can also have snapshots to restore to a previous state and not have to reinstall every time you make a large mistake. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Netw0rk_Man1ac Posted November 24, 2012 Author Share Posted November 24, 2012 I actually am currently running 6 VMs on my desktop system. The reason I was wanting to use that old laptop was so my wife wouldn't complain when I sat in the other room for hours at a time. I could at least sit on the couch and keep her somewhat happy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
01000010 Posted November 24, 2012 Share Posted November 24, 2012 that should run crunchbang, puppy linux, or damn small linux somewhat ok i would think. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Netw0rk_Man1ac Posted November 24, 2012 Author Share Posted November 24, 2012 that should run crunchbang, puppy linux, or damn small linux somewhat ok i would think. It does run DSL pretty well. The problem I'm having is that for some reason it's not formatting the HDD properly. Once the install is complete I'm getting a bad PBR error and it won't boot. I have /dev/hda1/ formatted as the primary partition and bootable but still getting the error. So I wasn't sure if it was something odd with the distro since it is an older one of if i just borked something. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digip Posted November 24, 2012 Share Posted November 24, 2012 (edited) I was going to say damn small linux, but there are probably newer distros that can be stripped down. You could probably use something like a USB thumb drive to install it on, run as a live DISK with persistence as the main computers HDD for storage. just need a 4GB ThumbDrive and you could probably put most anything on it, but it won't be uber fast. Just have to find one that can run off 256mb of ram or less. Most, are headless or command line based only distros I would think, unless you built your own from source with a light weight GUI. Nothing Gnome or KDE based, since they would eat up most of your memory and CPU cycles. Could try searching google and http://distrowatch.com/ for something. http://distrowatch.com/search.php?ostype=Linux&category=Old+Computers&origin=All&basedon=Debian¬basedon=None&desktop=Fluxbox&architecture=All&status=Active Edited November 24, 2012 by digip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GuardMoony Posted November 24, 2012 Share Posted November 24, 2012 You could also try and format with a other distro. And then just use the DSL and skip the format in the inbuild installer. And make sure the HDD doesnt got any bad sectors on it before trying anything else Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digip Posted November 24, 2012 Share Posted November 24, 2012 Im looking at http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=antix now, I might actually download and install it in a VM to see how it runs. Might be nice to have a super tiny distro with a more modern desktop and OS than DSL has had in the past. Just wonder what kinds of tools you can get to run on such small specs, like aircrack and such. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
01000010 Posted November 24, 2012 Share Posted November 24, 2012 hhmm dig, that looks pretty awesome, Debian testing means wheezy so it should run everything. I am also going to take a look at this and maybe using the same setup for a raspberry pi or mk802. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Netw0rk_Man1ac Posted November 27, 2012 Author Share Posted November 27, 2012 After a long weekend at work I'm finally downloading AntiX. I figured I'd give it a shot so if I can get it to run on that old laptop I'll post my thoughts on it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radau Posted November 27, 2012 Share Posted November 27, 2012 AntiX looks cool, now if I could just find an OS other than DSL for my 133 mhz pentium with 32 mb of ram and 1 GB hard drive haha. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Netw0rk_Man1ac Posted November 27, 2012 Author Share Posted November 27, 2012 lol the "system" i'm installing on is my wife's old laptop. When I got my hands on it it had Win XP loaded so that of course had to go away real quick. Unfortunately I don't have any RAM laying around that will fit it so I'm stuck until I can find some. I'm not going to spend much more than $20 to up the RAM in it since I'm hoping to get a new laptop in the next couple months since my wife stole my toshiba. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Netw0rk_Man1ac Posted November 27, 2012 Author Share Posted November 27, 2012 Well I got it installed, it's not the fastest thing in the world but it's not too bad. I like the interface for AntiX and if my system was a bit faster this would be a pretty decent distro. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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