Linux For Old PCs
January 19th, 2009 by ComputerBob
Several weeks ago, I told you how I’ve been installing antiX Linux on old PCs to give to domestic violence survivors, to help them complete their educations and build new lives for themselves.
Since then, I’ve done a lot of experimenting with antiX. I’ve found the combination of antiX 6.5 and 7.5 to be pretty usable for my purposes. First, I try the newer 7.5, and if I can’t get it to boot up correctly, then I try 6.5. I’ve found 6.5 to be friendlier to old PCs — especially those that only have 128MB RAM. While that procedure has worked with most of the old PCs, I haven’t been able to get either version of antiX to reliably run X with 1024×768 screen resolution on some of the onboard Intel graphics chipsets that come in old Dell desktop PCs. I’m sure that there must be a way to do it, but I haven’t found one. And since I’m not allowed to connect each old PC to the domestic violence center’s domain in order to download additional drivers or applications, and I have no interest in creating my own offline repositories, I’m limited to whatever comes on each distro’s CD.
On the other hand, every version of Puppy Linux that I’ve tried has quickly and easily given me my preferred screen resolution on every PC that I’ve tried it on, including those old Dells that I couldn’t get to work with antiX Linux. Even the newest version of Puppy Linux (4.1.2) has run really fast for me, even on Windows 95 hardware.
Yesterday, as an experiment, I easily booted and ran Puppy Linux (4.1.2) from its LiveCD at Xvesa 1024×768 screen resolution with 16-bit color on a Pentium 200 MHz (MMX) that had only 64 MB of RAM and no hard drive. Of course, with so little RAM and no hard drive, it took a couple of minutes for Puppy to boot up, and then each application took about a minute to start, but it worked. I think that’s amazing.
As an added bonus, Puppy Linux comes with a lot of very usable software, a very attractive and functional desktop and its own remastering application.
So now I’m thinking that maybe I should use Puppy Linux on every old PC that I configure from now on.
Here’s a good overview of three lightweight Linux distros: Damn Small Linux, TinyMe Linux and and Puppy Linux.
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Tags:
Domestic Violence, Education, Hardware, Linux, Personal, Software, Survivors, Tech Support, Work