[ale] Minimal installs on low-end hardware (was RE: [semi-OT] A local lurker de-lurks.)

[Michael B. Trausch]

Pope jonnyX wrote:
> 
> OK, the actual Linux (and/or BSD) related question:
> 
> Like most geeks, my non-techie friends give me computer-related
> things that are "obsolete" (hence my need to purge before moving;
> alas, the hardware was all snagged in under 24hrs, else I'd offer it
> here). I recently acquired one of the old "butterfly keyboard" IBM
> Thinkpads; it's a model 701c with a 486DX4/100 CPU, 24M RAM, 2G hdd,
> lots of extra goodies. I'm thinking maybe a glorified terminal for a
> Cisco-2511 hooked up to my routers & switches and/or maybe a config
> "server". What minimal distros would y'all recommend, and why?
> 

My vote goes to Slackware for such a system.

While I don't agree with the direction that they have gone with their
distribution in the past couple of years, they do provide a good
distribution for using as a small terminal based system, without having
too much in the way of overhead.

If you want to completely eliminate any extra overhead for a lightweight
X terminal setup, you could use a higher-powered system to build a
custom Gentoo distro, as well.  Of course, that would take a major time
investment, and if you do it often, maybe it wouldn't be worth the
effort every time (though, you could do it once, and take a dump image
of it, and use that to image other machines using the same setup, if you
wanted...)

In any case, my vote for this type of system would be Slackware.
Definitely not something like Ubuntu, because Ubuntu is a bit heavy for
a system like that.

	-- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch <fd0man at gmail.com> - Jabber: fd0man at livejournal.com

Demand freedom: Use open and free protocols, standards, and software.

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