Ok thank you all for your appreciated help. Finally I succeededed with AntiX. But it's very very slow (too much). The version I tried was a beta. I'd go with the 'base' one like suggested instead. Hope that will help. Thanks again all and I wiil mark as resolve
How to install Linux on my old laptop
- Thread starter JuJuan
- Start date
Tiny Core would happily run in 512 MB of RAM but the question becomes, "What do you want to do with it?" Doomscrolling facebook using firefox would probably eat up that amount of RAM pretty quickly.
The problem with swap is that it's slow (compared to RAM). Also, if you're using swap a lot then you can get into a situation where the computer is spending as much time moving pages into and out of swap space ('thrashing") as it is spending doing actual tasks. I would say, as a rule of thumb, don't set up more swap space than the size of your RAM, or maybe twice the size) and try to run the system such that hardly ever touches the swap space at all.
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Hmmmm...
With swap, we use some of our cheap, large disk space to make it look like our small, expensive RAM is bigger than it really is - but at the cost of some speed.
With buffering/caching, we use some of our fast expensive RAM to make our cheap slow disk drives look faster than they really are, but at the cost of some usable RAM.
And we do both of these things at the same time!
So... maybe we could could arrange to have the disk buffers paged out into the swap space. Win/win!! (just kidding)
The problem with swap is that it's slow (compared to RAM). Also, if you're using swap a lot then you can get into a situation where the computer is spending as much time moving pages into and out of swap space ('thrashing") as it is spending doing actual tasks. I would say, as a rule of thumb, don't set up more swap space than the size of your RAM, or maybe twice the size) and try to run the system such that hardly ever touches the swap space at all.
---
Hmmmm...
With swap, we use some of our cheap, large disk space to make it look like our small, expensive RAM is bigger than it really is - but at the cost of some speed.
With buffering/caching, we use some of our fast expensive RAM to make our cheap slow disk drives look faster than they really are, but at the cost of some usable RAM.
And we do both of these things at the same time!
So... maybe we could could arrange to have the disk buffers paged out into the swap space. Win/win!! (just kidding)
Hi, I Like your picture.
Basically, the computer will serve almost only for email and few visit on youtube.
Is Tiny Core compatible with my machine (i.e: 32 Bits and the PAE thing)? I don,t understand how can Windws Xp pro can run smoothly on my computer while AntiX is way too slow and lag till.....!? Another question if I can. I manage to boot from Bodhi Linux and it seems not so bad but it ask for a name and password. Any idea? Thanks a lot
Basically, the computer will serve almost only for email and few visit on youtube.
Is Tiny Core compatible with my machine (i.e: 32 Bits and the PAE thing)? I don,t understand how can Windws Xp pro can run smoothly on my computer while AntiX is way too slow and lag till.....!? Another question if I can. I manage to boot from Bodhi Linux and it seems not so bad but it ask for a name and password. Any idea? Thanks a lot
XP is REALLY lightweight compared to modern operating systems. The hardware was also probably optimized to run XP.
XP shouldn't be used online, for obvious reasons. So, you'll need to find something modern that actually wants to support a computer that's nearly 20 years old - and you'll want it to have the bells and whistles because you're new to Linux.
And, I think it's a bit unfortunate but that old hardware isn't going to be well supported. There are like three of you on the planet wanting to get that computer running and the resources don't exist to cater to your needs.
But...
If you can't get a Linux system up and running smoothly, there's a BSD option. As it stands, the folks at the Linux kernel level are actually removing support for some older hardware (and do so regularly). There's just no way they can keep supporting that stuff. The logistics simply aren't there. You're not doing the work to write your own code and submitting it upstream (nor would I expect you to) and you're not then supporting it.
So, as it stands, I think I'm going to start mentioning BSD more often. In specific, freeBSD supports so many architectures. I believe their 32 bit support even supports non-PAE systems (as well as PAE systems). They even support stuff like the old PowerPC ('member Apple's CPU of old?) and stuff like that.
I don't think any more will help, I certainly only used 2GB on low powered machines myself.
Brickwizard
Well-Known Member
I know of 3 lighter than i use that may work, puppy & tiny-core both have been mentioned, the other is
Home - Porteus - Portable Linux
Learn how to install Porteus, about Porteus modules and getting porteus to work with wifi internet.
www.porteus.org
windows uses part of the hard-drive as Ram, it is called Windows Virtual Memory and is still used in w10 & 11, [Linux has swap file, similar but not the same]
I concur with @KGIII here.
When XP was released to market all of 22 years ago - back in 2001 - general resources on almost any computer you could think of were far, FAR lower than what we take for granted these days. Of necessity, M$ had to make it lightweight in order to function on the hardware of the day.
Our Dell Inspiron lappie we bought brand-new in 2002 came with a P4, just 128 MB - yes, that's right; MB (not GB) of DDR1 SoDIMMs, and a 20GB Hitachi Travelstar HDD......with XP 'Home' installed. How the hell it ran, I will never, ever understand......but run it did. By today's standards, it would be considered slower than a snail and woefully under-powered.......but at the time, we thought it was the "bee's knees".
It's all relative. Software in any time-frame tends to get written to utilise 'to the max' the available resources of the day.....
Mike.
When XP was released to market all of 22 years ago - back in 2001 - general resources on almost any computer you could think of were far, FAR lower than what we take for granted these days. Of necessity, M$ had to make it lightweight in order to function on the hardware of the day.
Our Dell Inspiron lappie we bought brand-new in 2002 came with a P4, just 128 MB - yes, that's right; MB (not GB) of DDR1 SoDIMMs, and a 20GB Hitachi Travelstar HDD......with XP 'Home' installed. How the hell it ran, I will never, ever understand......but run it did. By today's standards, it would be considered slower than a snail and woefully under-powered.......but at the time, we thought it was the "bee's knees".
It's all relative. Software in any time-frame tends to get written to utilise 'to the max' the available resources of the day.....
Mike.
There's got to be some sort of corollary to Moore's Law.
The more resources you have, the more developers will try to consume them even if they don't need to.
They no longer have the programming restraints they used to have.
Some folks used to be fond of saying that all software suffered feature creep enough to eventually include an email client.
Picture: Thanks. Still the BDE, even if she -has- been misbehaving lately.
Email & youtube: I suspect even youtube will be a challenge on that computer. Couldn't hurt to try it.
The PAE thing, Antix and Bodhi: I honestly have no idea.
XP: IMO, MS Windows versions always used to required a hardware spec just a little "ahead of the curve" though Windows was often provided on underspec'd or marginally sufficient systems. If your hardware met the "recommended" spec rather than the "minimum" spec, you were golden, otherwise, "just don't". These days RAM, Storage and CPU capacities aren't so much of an issue.
I know of 3 lighter than i use that may work, puppy & tiny-core both have been mentioned, the other is
Home - Porteus - Portable Linux
Learn how to install Porteus, about Porteus modules and getting porteus to work with wifi internet.
Thanks a lot Brickwizard! I just spent a half hour installing Porteus - and then the entire rest of the evening playing with it even though I have no expectation of using it beyond learning a little of how it works. You made me do this.
Porteus seems decent, and the MATE desktop is pretty, at least with the supplied wallpaper - though I try not to judge a distro by its default desktop wallpaper - but I'm not familiar enough with either to give it either a "thumbs up" nor a "thumbs down". The install wasn't too painful (this on a USB stick that already had grub set up and just needed Porteus to slide in beside Tiny Core).
Fun fact: Unlike either MS Windows or Tiny Core, Porteus informed me that the AAA batteries in my Logitech wireless keyboard were almost dead. I had no idea that keyboard could communicate that sort of thing to the host. I usually just wait until the keyboard (or mouse) starts acting flaky then (if I haven't already smashed it) try new batteries.
