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Damn Small Linux?
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> "Only" 512 MB RAM
Whippersnappers!
I remember when I had less than that amount of disk space!
There's a whole distro, Damn Small Linux, which fits in 50 MB, and it's hardly the tiniest distro out there, not even counting the distros which aren't meant to be "used" in a normal sense but only run inside containers. tomsrtbt fits on a floppy, using dark magics to fit 1.722 MB on a 1.44 MB 3.5" floppy.
The beauty of open source is that it all depends what you want it to be. There are plenty of Linux distro's that will still run ok on a 486 w/around 16MB RAM and <1GB disk space.
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
Damn Small Linux? the min requirements are:
CLI (non-graphical Linux) Minimum Requirements 486dx or 100% compatible processor 8mb ram (16mb recommended) CDROM drive 1.44mb floppy drive (for boot floppy, if needed) Monochrome (2 color) monitor [edit]
Minimum Requirements for DSL with X-window 486dx or 100% compatible processor 16mb ram (24mb recommended) dual-speed CDROM (quad-speed or better recommended) 1.44mb floppy drive (for boot floppy, if needed) VGA monitor and video card a mouse (serial, ps/2, usb) and a higher level of computer processor
128mb of RAM? I find it a miracle you could even install Windows XP on it! Talking about that, why the hell do you think it's'a good idea to use an old outdated system like XP? Install Linux on it, even if it runs slower.
Anyhow, you should look into something lighter then Ubuntu, any of them will be too heavy. Try Damn Small Linux for example, might be just what you need.
Check out Damn Small Linux http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
"Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!)"
To bad it didn't had the CD ROM like this same model had.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOqY0M7xMjc
WARNING
This process may cause excess stress and frustration.
Not recommended for people with high blood pressure, a history of heart problems or aneurysms, pregnant women, or anybody else who is unable to cope with high levels of stress.
The author takes NO RESPONSIBILITY for any damage, either mental or physical, caused by this process.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/WithFloppies
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/floppy_only_install_no_netcard_linux_only.html
Meanwhile, on the #linuxmasterrace, Damn Small Linux takes 50MB.
Fully featured distros (crunchbag, debian, arch, slitaz) needs less than 1GB to run
Ubuntu Live CD contains 730MB of data. It contains mail client, browser (firefox) and libreoffice + few basic apps
I was going to suggest Damn Small Linux, but I see that it requires 16mb of ram. Also, it appears active, but I think it is not maintained anymore...
Anyway, at this point, either get more ram and an installation medium (network adapter and/or optical drive), or another computer.
Hope you find what you're looking for.
I get the frustration, but I'm old enough to remember folks complaining that Windows needed four megabytes of RAM to run. The horror! OS feature creep has been going on as long as there have been OSes. If you're interested in a minimalist desktop OS that will run lightning fast on a 10+ year old system, check out Damn Small Linux, Debian, or (if you're a masochist) Arch.
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/frequently_asked_questions.html
I've played with this a couple of times. It beat out Windows 98 on a 486 laptop for usability.
The other aspect to improving the "speed" of your computer is to minimize irrelevant processes. Tweaking; so to speak. Something that the new app oriented systems nowadays makes harder to do.
We don't "need" remote assist connections to auto-load, for instance. (in non-work environments.)
Some tweaking is simply telling windows not to use resources like RAM. (by adjusting graphics smoothing, or removing the frosted effect from the original aero system.)
A number of automatic systems like creating restore points at set intervals can lag your system. Having Steam,Origin, and the other dozen or so Game programs loaded will slow your computer. Having your torrent manager active at all times slows, your computer.
(virus scanners too, but you know... keep them on.)
Linux is free and more highly customizable, and it's fun to fuck around with, a lot of distros can run great on low-end machines, there's cool stuff like a 50mb linux distro, Damn Small Linux, you can run linux on a bunch of architectures, lots of distros have neat features, I could keep going on and on. Heck, some people just don't like windows and/or microsoft.
No, windows software tends not to work well in linux even in wine - I generally recommend dual booting or a windows VM if you want to make a linux distro your primary OS.
There is nothing preventing a distro from running on old hardware. Look at Damn Small Linux for an example.
As for why things seem to need higher hardware requirements than in the past, it's because it's easier that way. You could spend countless hours making sure everything runs as optimal as possible for the hardware you have and end up with a timeless classic like Chrono Trigger in 4 MB running on a Super Nintendo. Or you can pull in a few stable libraries, save a ton of time, headache, and bugs because a computer with 512 MB of RAM is $5 these days. Remember, developers do not have unlimited time and it's often a balance between optimization, features, or bug fixes.
I use it as a scripting language for embedded systems calling Lua from C++ as it's pretty lightweight and efficient.
I also occasionally use it to make little cross platform utilities that run on windows and linux.
It was also used quite extensively in Damn Small Linux which unfortunately seems to have died a death since the devs fell out.
Try Vectore linux, mimimum requirements:
>Light Edition: Pentium 166 or better, 64MB RAM minimum, 1.8GB hard drive space for full system - more for your data.
I'll second this. Tails if you've got a flash drive with 2GB or more, or Damn Small Linux if you've only got a 64MB flash drive.
Tails and TOR will prevent most sorts of snooping. DSL will only prevent snooping on the computer itself. (But of course, it can't stop someone if you leave your computer logged in or they're looking over your shoulder.)
if you don't mind going on with XP the nLite can strip it down quite a bit.
Can't quite remember how low we could get it, but it was low.
Other than that, some light weight Linux distro is probably the way to go. Soemthing like Damn Small Linux
Like the net installs, just enough to boot and get the networking working and start the install pulling all of the files over the network/internet.
There are also some very small desktop distros. DSL (Damn Small Linux) is under 50Mb and that a full desktop distro with software and a web browser. http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/images/dsl-4.2.x.jpg
Damnsmall hasn't been updated in a while, but it was current when that gear was still in common use. It'll probably work fine.
Tiny Core is more current, but it should still work.
I hate to say it, but you'd probably benefit from a Gentoo install. You'd have to customize it for him. It'd be a lot of work, but it'd run pretty well.
All that said, any modern web browser is probably going to be uncomfortable on that rig with more than one tab open or on a javascript-heavy website.
Best of luck. If you have any success, I'd love to read a follow-up.
Even better would be to register to their forums (DSL Forums) and ask for help there. General Linux forums are not a good place to seeking distro-specific help.
I have a system of similar vintage, but with more RAM, and I can boot Live CDs without trouble. No need to resort to old distros; those specs are good enough to run some modern lightweight distros. Consider trying one of these:
Don't neglect that it is possible to configure a "minimal" version of many heavyweight Linux distros without much fuss. Debian is a popular suggestion for such purposes, for example. I'm sure there will be more great suggestions.
You realise Ibiblio handles 20+ million visits a day, right? They can't just drop everything to send bits to you as fast as their network hardware can handle.
Here's a list of mirrors. Use the one closest to you. Better yet, use the torrents. Don't bitch about the time and effort of people you don't know who provide a service to you for no cost.
this, because it will run on anything. When the Zombies hit, I will have a flash drive with this on it to do things anywhere with a CPU, RAM, and a monitor. Clearly going with the "crucial" option here.
Ignore fitzroy95's recommendations, that machine is far too old for Red Hat or Ubuntu. For what you have, try something like Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux. I've run Puppy on a machine from that era (a p1 233mhz), and it ran very nicely.
Anything with Mate or Xfce should do, some of their default themes are quite old fashioned.
If you want an ugly distro just to experiment (i.e you won't use it to work/you'll use it in a VM), my personal recommendation would be Damn Small Linux. Back in the day (2008) it was considered to have a little bit of a Spartan look, by 2021 standards, it's definitively ugly.
The very smallest is DSL heck it will run on a 486!
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
The tricky thing is that laptop has a 32bit CPU and many of the mainstream Linux distros have dropped support for 32bit.
Personally, I would go for MX Linux, but AntiX has a lower RAM requirements (256mb) if you can't reach the 1Gb RAM minimum for MX Linux.
I understand the question, but I think it needs to be clarified better. Here is why I say this:
Ubuntu Complete Desktop install is totally bloated **IMO** because I do not want crap games and Libre Office installed in most all my cases. Its full of just junk that **IMO** would never use (cheese, mutter, remmina, rythymbox, totem, VIM (lol I added this just for troll points! :P ))
Ubuntu Desktop Minimal Install is a little bit bloated because **IMO** it still has destop things I dont want, but it is much much better.
Ubuntu Server (and not selecting anything other than say OpenSSL Server) is fairly lightweight **IMO**, and I can deal with this.
Assuming Desktop :- It doesn't matter which distro you talk about (Mint, Gentoo, Arch, etc) they all have various levels of bloat depending on the devs ideas about what people want.
​
And the other problem with the question is without defining "how it is measured large" , I could install DSL, and make it bigger than Ubuntu Desktop if someone wanted to dare me!
​
So perhaps edit the question to say "default install Desktop environment" ? or whatever you are defining it as.
Dam Small Linux might work also: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
Or DietPI
Both are extremely lightweight. But both could be probably stripped a bit more.
Then install Java and Xorg.
Instead of a desktop manager use minecraft so that is the only thing running.
If you really need a desktop manager, there is TinyVM which is like 50 lines of C, lol
TVM is also extremely small: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twm
128mb is an unrealistically low amount if you want to use a modern browser(regular Firefox takes 60MB). Even Puppy Linux requires at least 208MB.
But after some web-searching i found http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ and http://www.tinycorelinux.net/
One of them might be something for you.
Years ago I played with an installation called Damn Small Linux which is a Debian installation that was meant to run off of 50MB of space. It even claims that it can run fully within as little RAM as 128MB, so if this is running 256MB of L3 than it's certainly large enough to run on the L3.
You may have better results trying Damn Small Linux since it can run in as little of 16MB of RAM. http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
As for SCSI, devices usually have SCSI IDs that are set with jumpers or switches, but once in a rare while with software. The SCSI controller will usually use ID 7 so the drives need to have other IDs, and each device on the bus must be unique. Termination is placed on the end of the bus.
I would attempt to transfer any files using networking instead of USB. Adding a USB card is going to be tough and you may find it difficult to get a USB connection off a 20 pin header.
Drivesavers is local to you. But you may find it worth your while to exhaust all of your knowledge because their services are expensive. http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/contact-drivesavers/
Because the drive actually has 29 gigs of space on it. If you wanted you could likely replace the operating system with something like Damn Small Linux and have nearly all of those 29 gigs free for storage. You could also probably pull the drive from that computer, remove the OS, and use it as a secondary storage drive in another computer and use all 29 gigs. Advertising it as less than it actually is would be inaccurate.
Now, advertising it as "29 gigs (15 usable with default OS)" would be the best thing to do, but advertising it as 29 gigs is not actually misleading.
A distribution being "light" or "heavy" is a result of the software that comes with it. Puppy isn't the lightest, either, there's Damn Small Linux which is forever capped at 50 MB, and so refuses to upgrade from 2.4.x (released in 2001!) to the much larger 2.6.x kernel. Puppy itself makes some sacrifices, but not as many. Keep in mind that these are small groups of people (or sometimes only one person) who are taking the Linux kernel, stripping out modules which they think are relatively unnecessary, packaging in certain software they think make it relatively easy to use, and publishing their creation online.
Being "light" isn't the end-all-be-all. DSL is an extreme example, but something like it or Puppy on a live-boot disk could be nice for if I come upon a 10-15 year-old desktop that I want to check if it boots. But for my primary machine, I want a modern version of the kernel, with a good selection of kernel modules installed so I can support things like USB devices, printers, or anything else I might happen to find. I also want my favorite window manager, file manager, browser, themes, networking support, and the like.
For me, I like doing a minimal install of Debian, selecting SSH, printers, and network support from the netinstaller, and install the rest after first boot. I prefer i3, but as for a more traditional DE, you can always do apt install --no-install-recommends mate-core to avoid installing MATE's default file-manager/plugins/menus/etc. Same thing for XFCE4, LXDE, etc. This way, you can choose your own file-manager/plugins/etc., and make them as heavy or as light as you choose!
Sorry for the wall of text, (even larger than yours), but I hope you get the picture I'm trying to describe here.
Can i ask why you want to use it? Only thing i can think of, is Damn Small Linux, takes around 50MB only. But still that SD card is so small and probably slow, that IMO you should just buy bigger one for like 5 bucks or so, if you need it for something.
You might want to investigate Damn Small Linux. Here's an archived discussion about running ultra-light distros on extremely old hardware, with more suggestions. Apparently you can install DSL on a hard drive by moving it to a computer with better input devices temporarily, because it scans for hardware whenever it boots.
Edit: tyop
This is getting to be above my experience level, but what do you thing if he runs everything in ram? Dump ubuntu for something like Damn Small Linux. http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
Build one VM to act as a PXE server, Then have everything boot from PXE and load right in to RAM. 1GB per VM would be more then enough to run DSL Obvious running in ram there will be no saving work. So if you need to reboot or loose power all is lost.
Are you looking for a small linux distro? http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ Is about 50MB and is bootable off of a CD/USB drive. Or http://www.tinycorelinux.net/ is about 12MB.
Other linux distributions are generally larger because they include more applications and drivers than the smaller ones. If you install Ubuntu for instance you'll get a bunch of default applications, KDE, Gnome (I think they still have both), etc.
It should help your notebook, it may not be much of a performance boost, but it should still be better than windows. If you really want to sacrifice the looks of your operating system, then instead of going with the the distributions a listed above, you can also install minimalist distributions meant for older, or less powerful machines. Lubuntu is a great lightweight alternative which is based on Ubuntu. It doesn't give up too much, and is still noob friendly. If you have some experience with Linux/Unix then you can go really small with Damn Small Linux. DSL is only around 50mb so it doesn't take nearly as long to install or download as the other distros which are rather large when compared to it.
Hmm, good point. I'm not really certain, either. I don't know the exact specs, but I did a quick search on that laptop and found this information on its specs. It could be a stretch. I honestly was thinking of specs more like those of a netbook.
If even Crunchbang is too much for it, there's always the really light Linux distributions like Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux. I haven't played around with either of those in quite a while, though, so I can't speak to how easy it is to get them playing DVDs.
Even if those run well, I'm still not sure how it'll do with DVDs without trying it. If not video, maybe one of those will at least make it useful for something. Sorry I don't have any more specific advice. If that doesn't work, hopefully someone else will have some ideas.
If you are running out of memory in matlab, see the documentation on this issue.
If you have done this, and it does not work. Try installing linux (there are even low memory versions) and running matlab from the command window without a desktop:
matlab -nodesktop -nosplash -r "script"
where script.m is the name of your matlab script.
Ah in that case it's almost definitely either linux misunderstanding your keyboard, or a BIOS setting gone awry. If you have a spare 30min I'd try running a live copy of Damn Small Linux, just to see if the keyboard works on another platform.
Looks like it has a 33MHz Intel i486SX chip in it.
No FPU! No Problem!
Here's full X-windows on a unit with that processor but with 16MB RAM, http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/486.html
You will be restricted to the console, certainly nothing wrong with that though. I've seen the 2.6 kernel run in 4MB RAM on a cut-down WRT54G, so you should at least be able to get a modern kernel.
Floppy as your storage sucks though, would be nice to have at least a 4MB chunk of storage too.
I didn't realise that DSL could be run as an application from inside Windows. That's pretty cool. I think I'll have to try doing that just for its own sake.
But, will this help out for this particular problem? Is the idea that I could then run TrueCrypt from inside of DSL?
The DSL page mentions that if it (=DSL) is run from inside of Windows then it won't have direct access to hard drives/external devices: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Which_File_do_I_download%3F_%28long_version%29 So I would guess that TrueCrypt run in DSL running inside of Windows wouldn't be able to access files on the thumb drive.
Still: Fastest in what category of usage?
So just that you have a tendency for solid performance:
Up to the point where you are greeted with the login speed, all those distributions will perform almost identically.
At this point, things will rely more on CPU and RAM. This heavily depends on the desktop environment or window manager you load for the session.
Since you have very little amount of RAM, you will get the best overall performance from the desktop environment that is the lightest. LXDE is top notch when we talk about RAM usage. It will take somewhat of ~300 MB after initial load, so you have a lot of RAM free that other programs can and will use.
If you want something ultra lightweight, take a look at Damn Small Linux (DSL), 4M Linux or Puppy Linux.
Your RAM will probably be the bottleneck for performance in this system. Multitasking will get laggy very soon. This is due to the fact that as soon as your system runs out of free ram for programs to use, it will swap what’s already in the RAM to your hard drive to free up RAM for the thing you are currently working with. The hard drive is always slower than RAM. The first hard drive that can compete with RAM in terms of speed is the PlayStation 5’s SSD.
Last time I checked the smallest Linux with a functional desktop comes in at around 50MB. MegaByte. http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
Of course, storage isn't that much of a bottleneck, so even if it was 50GB it wouldn't matter anymore, so there's no reason to trim your base install down that much, except for gaining nerd points.
In my opinion, it'd be far more beneficial to savor the longevity on the phone, and buy a cheap laptop to put Linux on and use that as a server instead. A phone better than the V20 won't come out for a very long time - companies are dead set on planned obsolescence, continuous regression and feature removal. You're lucky enough to own one, so why blow through it in 5 (maybe more) years when you could put it to good use later? As for the laptop, a cheap $100-200 thing would do the trick with something like Porteus, a 300mb OS. Even "DSL", the 50mb OS, would work for FTP: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org
The minimal install of Ubuntu I mentioned above is fine. But, if you want to go smaller still, you can try Arch Linux or DamnSmallLinux. (Although be warned, Arch Linux is not that easy to get up and running at first.)
I would at first try something like Debian with XFCE if that doesn’t work i would try Arch/Manjaro also with XFCE. If that doesn’t work I would try Damn small Linux (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org) and if that doesn’t work, I would try Puppy Linux (http://puppylinux.com). If that wouldn’t work I would install the Hannah Montana Linux and call it a day. For all these things I would choose the 32 bit version because I think the 64 Bit versions need at least 4 GB Ram.
Ok, let me try to explain this further:
When you go to church, they don't "charge admission" at the door, with a "price of admission". They usually let attendee's in "free of charge" since there is "no price of admission". Attendee's can "donate" any amount they chose, because there is no "price attached". Or they can chose not to donate, because church is "free for admission".
>Definition of donation: the act or an instance of donating: such as a : the making of a gift especially to a charity or public institution b : a free contribution : gift
Now, a "sale" is an exchange of goods for a "price". Commerce an interchange of goods or commodities, especially on a large scale between different countries (foreign commerce) or between different parts of the same country (domestic commerce); trade; business.
Now the OP clarified that it was a "donation", not a "purchase". Not until after I pointed out that in his original post that he bought a copy. So your semantic argument is not one of semantics after all. He clarified that his donation, gift was for the copy. He didn't purchase it after all.
>If you like Damn Small Linux, please consider donating; even small contributions will help fund its continued development.
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/download.html
Now here you don't have to buy a copy of Damn Small Linux. You can download it free of charge. If you chose to donate, you can as it's not a commercial product.
Depending on how familiar you are with linux, there are different distro's in mind.
But I'd recommend Ubuntu Server if you're new. Altough 128MB RAM may not be enough for that.
Other than that there's DSL (Damn Small Linux).
Maybe someone else knows a better distro.
What about DSL?
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
Some of the features:
- Damn Small Linux is a very versatile 50MB mini desktop oriented Linux distribution.
- Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram
- Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!)
Programs included:
- XMMS (MP3, CD Music, and MPEG)
- FTP client
- Dillo web browser
- Netrik web browser
- FireFox
- Spreadsheet
- Sylpheed email
- spellcheck (US English)
- word-processor (Ted)
- three editors (Beaver, Vim, and Nano [Pico clone])
- graphics editing and viewing (Xpaint, and xzgv)
- Xpdf (PDF Viewer)
- emelFM (file manager)
- Naim (AIM, ICQ, IRC)
- VNCviwer,
- Rdesktop
- SSH/SCP server and client
- DHCP client
- PPP
- PPPoE (ADSL)
- a web server
- calculator
- generic and GhostScript printer support
- NFS, Fluxbox and JWM window managers
- games
- system monitoring apps
- a host of command line tools
- USB support, and pcmcia support
- some wireless support.
You should try one of Ubuntu's Old Releases from around the period the computer was manufactured (P4 was 2002-08).
Have fun!
Not around anymore. Their website is down and they haven't made a release since 2012 according to DistroWatch
> I don't see how it's any more bloated than any standard Linux DE
Have you looked at the WinSXS folder lately? What about System32? Yes, Windows is bloated, much more than your standard Linux DE! Your standard Linux DE can fit onto a live USB (some distros will even fit on a CD ROM and then there's the absurdly small distros like Damn Small Linux) with a full entire live session that can be booted without being installed. You can sort of do this with Windows too but you need a much larger USB stick (not to mention the licensing concerns that come with this, but that's a different issue)...
> They all come with a bunch of useless junk, which is to top it off completely integrated into the DE so removing something breaks another
This is nothing to do with the DE and rather a packaging problem with your distro. Their meta-packages are likely what causes this issue. If you're using Ubuntu perhaps try the minimal install which is a simple checkbox in the installer.
> Do I count the times an Ubuntu update has made it not boot?
I'm sorry this happened to you. In my experience this is a rarity, my father whose not exactly very tech-savvy and needs nothing but a web browser has been using Linux Mint for some time now and not a single apt update has made it unbootable. It just keeps chugging along just fine.
> But dual booting seems sort of meaningless, no offense
It depends on your perspective. If you need Windows for a specific program only then treat it like the tool it is and use it for this task only. Once you've finished the job then boot back into your Linux distro. Just because you need Windows for one specific task doesn't mean you need to do all of your computing using it (granted if you need to do this task repeatedly, rebooting could get annoying, perhaps look into virtual machines if you have a powerful enough computer).
http://www.devil-linux.org/home/index.php
from the website: > Devil Linux was originally intended to be a dedicated firewall/router but now Devil-Linux can also be used as a dedicated server for many applications.
EDIT: the other options I would recommend: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ | LFS | Gentoo Linux
In the long run that extra bit of £££. As far as I am running 64bit :). http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ can run on a single monitor. I was planning on getting a GTX 980 ~~Ti~~ is overkill. The realtek onboard cards support that, if you buy it from? i want to build something that's going to skype with me to help with that.
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/category_installing_dsl.html Once you install the OS you can pick and choose the packages you want. If you only want to use it as a server then you can omit using any desktop manager. It's light and should run quite well on your hardware
Ok, get Damn Small Linux and burn it to a usb drive. From there, boot from it on your laptop, naviagte to C:/Windows/System32 and make backups/copies of cmd.exe and sethc.exe. Now replace sethc.exe with cmd.exe (by renaming) and boot back to windows. Message back when you've got that done.
I have debian jessie loaded on to a thinkpad 600e, which looks to be newer than the laptop you have. Though command line only, and I honestly don't do much with it beside boot it up every so often for amusement.
Unless the ram is maxed out you'll have a tough time getting anything to run, even damn small linux wants 128 I think.
Edit: Nevermind, 128 is to run FROM ram. DSL might work. See here.
I think DSL would run on this machine.
There's floppy install steps but it is not recommended if you have any other way (USB stick, cdrom, harddrive move, external hdd/cdrom, network card).
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/floppy_only_install_no_netcard_linux_only.html
You might be able to put Damn Small Linux on it.
"Damn Small Linux is a very versatile 50MB mini desktop oriented Linux distribution."
It can
Boot from a business card CD as a live linux distribution (LiveCD)
Boot from a USB pen drive
Boot from within a host operating system (that's right, it can run inside Windows)
Run very nicely from an IDE Compact Flash drive via a method we call "frugal install"
Transform into a Debian OS with a traditional hard drive install
Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram
Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!)
Modularly grow -- DSL is highly extendable without the need to customize
I like Linux Mint, however if you are looking for light maybe check out
Check out Damn Small Linux for a really lite version http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
You will need to verify your hardware is supported, just like any OS you load
USB Pass-through on your VM should take care of the issue. Just disable / remove the driver from the host os and if the guest os supports it, then you should be good. Or you could boot to a Linux live CD (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/).
Looks promising, but you'll have a pretty bare system afterwards.
If you have a hard drive and if you expect a graphical interface then you're better off taking one of the numerous existing small distributions, DSL looks like it'll fit on just about anything, and it comes with a working desktop. With a busybox build you'll get a command line and nothing else.
Trackball might have some dirt on the rollers or rotary encoders so it can't see left/right movement. Can you remove the ball and clean inside?
Also, no idea what that laptop is, but with less than 8MB of ram i doubt there are many linux distros you could run. Even http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ which is based on an ancient Linux kernel needs more RAM than that.
There was a blip of activity... two years ago. That thread died and is only sputtering on with random newbies asking for help. Here is the announcement of "DSL coming back" and it too quickly sputters out. DSL is dead.
Damn Small LInux http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ is an ultra minimalist system that still runs an X server, (an old version of) Firefox and Open Office. It requires some obstinacy to do more than the minimum, but it will feel snappy on a Pentium.
Nah, i ran a DSL box for like 3 years; if it's got a browser, a note-pad like application, a calculator, a pdf and epub reader, and a spreadsheet, it's good enough for what i do most of the time on my third box.
I can tell you the smallest is probably DSL, better known as Damn Small Linux, with only 50MB's of data, I don't know any smaller OS's. The biggest is hard to determine, since a lot of the bigger OS's come prepackaged with a lot of software packages, such as text editors, graphical editors, and stuff like wallpapers, arrays of different sounds, themes, etc. which don't really contribute to the OS.
The largest linux distro I know of is backtrack OS, and it's that large because it comes with loads of auditing tools. Without /home it needs about 5GB of space. My C:/Windows is about 16GB big(windows 7), so I think, even if you take in account possible temp files and extensions, it beats any linux distro by a long shot. The latest OSX comes in a download that's 4GBs big, and probably decompresses into at most double that. I think Windows takes the cake for biggest OS, but don't forget that it's littered with features, software, and other stuff that you probably don't even see.
I was checking out Nintendo DS homebrew programs, and stumbled across DSLinux. I was bored, and had everything to run it, if minimally, I checked it out. Then I noticed it was based on something called "μClinux", which I had never heard of before. μClinux was based on the Linux kernel. The Linux Kernel is used in many free operating systems, with free programs that do everything I could want! That one bored click on a new program has changed how I think about and use computers. Apple and Microsoft don't make the only operating systems. This rocked my world.
That same week, I downloaded, and played with, Damn Small Linux, and started learning about GNU/Linux. That one link I clicked in a fit of boredom changed everything I knew about computers. I would shake at the thought of a computer virus before, but now know that I could easily fix/replace the software, and that it's not the end of the world. I started to develop something in a philosophy of how to use software, which licenses I should try to steer towards, the free software movement, and copyleft as a whole. Four years later (almost exactly), I have a netbook, running two of the more techical Linux distributions in existence (Arch and Slackware), thoroughly customized to my wants and needs. My 17-year-old self would shit bricks.
TL;DR: Discovered Nintendo DS program, rethunk how I use computers.
Normally that would have been one of my first steps, but I have no live CDs on me, and being in rural Australia makes downloading a full-sized ISO a pipe dream, so I'd discounted the idea.
However, you just made me realise that I'd (really daftly) forgotten about DSL. Gonna go grab that now.
Hi, use this http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ to make the USB easily enough (sorry if i might sound condescending at times, i don't know how much you know sorry) And any small distro is fine. Gentoo minimal install from gentoo.org or DSL from http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
All you need is a way to type in that little command fsck -a /dev/hdX
You can download a small Linux distro, like Damn Small Linux and burn it to a CD and boot from it, then try to upload something to see if it's a problem with your connection or with something in Windows.
Just as a matter of taste, I would suggest using Microsoft Security Essentials over Avast!. I used Avast! for a while and it marked compressed file as a compression bomb. Of course, the best defense against malware is safe surfing.
If you know what your doing (IF AND ONLY IF) you can crack open that battery, buy some new Lithium Ion cells and replace your dead cells. Get the cells with tabs on them so you reduce the chance of killing yourself in the process of soldering your new cells in.
If you have the skill-set you can bring the price of a new battery down from $100 to about $15 usd.
How to rebuild a Li-Ion battery pack
I did this to my super old gateway laptop and she now runs DSL and a low resource web server like a champ (without random deaths).
Another thing to think about is getting a very small footprint linux distro like DSL and then run PS3MediaServer on it so you have more processing power at your disposal... PS3MediaSever is built on Java and therefore runs on linux in the same way it does on Windows...
With Ubuntu, it would be likely. But hardware vendors don't often give linux support, ("They will steal our secrets!" kind of mentality)
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Verified_Wireless_Cards
Even Riva TNT 2 with TV-out could manage that and that is ancient. AMD Duron 700 MHz and 128 MB RAM is more than enough for basic video playback. You could use Damn Small Linux and thus run from a flash drive or a memory card. http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
I know you've had a lot of suggestions (and a decent amount of luck), but if you ever find yourself in a similar situation, I'd recommend getting the following:
- 1) a cheap USB key (or two or three)
- 2) a blank CD-R or CD-RW
- 3) a copy of Damn Small Linux
The DSL site has the information you need to create bootable CDs and thumb drives. The best part is, if you wind up with a loaner computer that you can't replace the OS on for whatever reason, you'll still be able to use a Linux environment on it - provided it can boot from USB or an optical drive, that is.
How to get behind 7 boxxie:
The first thing you need to worry about isn't getting behind a proxy at all...it's not having your browser give up information about you. There are javascripts and flash for this, and they exist specifically to track you online (facebook, google, etc. do this [and no this isn't some sort of tin foil hattery. Google does this so that they can serve you relevant ads all over the nets, and facebook does this so that they can display 'like' buttons all over the web]).
So what is an enterprising revolutionary to do?
Get yourself a linux live CD like Damn Small Linux and burn it to a CD (a CD, not a thumb drive).
Open your laptop, find the harddrive, and remove it.
Put the CD in your laptop, drive across town, and walk into bar that is next to the library of a local community college.
Boot your laptop, when it prompts you, type the following:
dsl26 toram
This is telling it to move everything from the CD into ram. (You could do it without toram, but toram makes it faster).
Get on the internets.
NOW you can get on tor.
Pay your bar tab in cash, tip your waitress, but don't tip your waitress enough to stand out. You want her to forget you as soon as you leave.
Enjoy your tweets!
You can PXE boot just about anything. But keep in mind that anything you network boot will either have to be transferred over TFTP (not reliable), or you'll have to bootstrap something running over a reliable transport protocol (something like samba or NFS) - and in either case, you're going to have to wait for the network to transfer the image. For this reason, you should look at small distros.
I've tried both Puppy and DSL, and Puppy failed miserably, but DSL ran like a charm (50MB isn't too shabby over a LAN, especially for a full X environment and all the trimmings). I've put the net installers for larger distros on the PXE server too, but you may not need that :)
DSL Details:
Boot server: PXELinux
Kernel arguments: init=/etc/init ramdisk_size=100000 initrd=dsl/minirt24.gz toram noeject BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix
Walkthrough here!