Comments on: Win 98 beats Linux.

By: bbum

bbum — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:05:38 +0000

No — but we had full GUIs on hard drives much smaller than a CDROM that ran on systems with 64MB or less. The Ubuntu Alternative download isn’t really a live CD and the whole experience with it sucked.

Likewise, the SLAX KillBill edition was painful — bad design combined with crappy UE. Though, to give it credit, the über-tiny version of it works somewhat.

I’ll give DamnSmall a try.

By: Ryan Brown

Ryan Brown — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 14:56:25 +0000

We didn’t have full GUI’s available via a live CD 8 years ago. Install debian or somesuch to the hard drive if you only have 64mb of RAM…

By: Travis Cripps

Travis Cripps — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 22:40:54 +0000

I second the recommendation to try DSL.

By: anon

anon — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 15:01:14 +0000

You tried this: http://damnsmalllinux.org/

By: Jason Clark

Jason Clark — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 15:00:13 +0000

Have you tried Xubuntu? It’s Ubuntu with the XFCE window manager, designed to have lower resource requirements than other distros. According to the Release Notes for 6.06, You can’t run the Live CD with only 64M, but you should be able to run an installed system with 64M. YMMV- I haven’t tested Xubuntu with such a shallow memory footprint, but I’ve otherwise had good luck with Ubuntu and Xubuntu.

If you really just want to boot from a live cd, any way you can create a 128M - 256M partition for a linux swap space? Might help performance.

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 10:53:03 +0000

The BSD operating systems are still minimal and make good use of old hardware. Why not give those a try? OpenBSD for minimalism and security, and FreeBSD for performance, more driver support and a bigger ports tree.