Computers made in the year 2007 generally have in the neighborhood of 1Gb RAM and processors of over 1GHz. So Linux distros have developed to utilize that power. Older machines might have 64Mb RAM. Some distros the author tried to run on such a machine are: Absolute Linux, Puppy Linux, Deli Linux, and Vector Linux. Vector Linux seemed the best. Here is a short explanation of how I came to that opinion.

Site: http://www.pcbypaul.com/absolute/

What looked good:

• Requires 48Mb RAM and about 3Gb hard drive
• Designed to be installed on a computer
• Uses Icewm and Rox which are very good and lightweight

Report after installing:

I installed on a laptop that has a working Ubuntu installation. The install is easy, but I did not find the way to make wireless work or much help on their Forum. After the install the wireless on my working system no longer worked even after turning it off and back on. So beware of that. Overall, I found Absolute not a good choice.

Site: http://www.puppylinux.com/ and http://www.puppylinux.org

Puppy Linux, Like Damned Small Linux (DSL) is designed to run as a LiveCD. It does not create a user account and so is not really suitable to install on a hard drive. A user account can be created, but one is still not able to login as that user.

I tried 3.01-seamonkey Puppy Linux which requires 128Mb RAM, but there is a procedure where you can use swap. I made swap on my hard drive and Puppy found it when I loaded the LiveCD; so I think it would run on a machine with 64Mb.

Get puppy-3.01-seamonkey.iso on this page or a mirror: ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/ It’s around 100Mb. Burn the iso to a cd.

Put the cd in the drive and boot. At the boot: prompt quickly begin typing the following: puppy pfix=nox ( If you wait more than 5 seconds it will automatically boot.) “nox” means “no X”.

Look at this cfdisk explanation, because you will be using that to make a swap partition. http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/IBM7248-HOWTO/cfdisk.html You should make around 200Mb for swap. Be sure to set it to type 82

Then format it as swap: mkswap /dev/hda1 (change the hda1 to whatever it is)

Reboot with Ctrl-Alt-Del. This time don’t type anything, just let it boot normally. Accept the defaults along the way. You should now be able to use Puppy with the LiveCD. This is not a good distro for installing on the hard drive, but with some swap it is usable as a LiveCD older computer.

Site: http://www.delilinux.org/wiki/doku.php

Deli Linux is Beta and a bit buggy on the install. It is not a good distro at this time for the average Linux user.

Site: http://www.vectorlinux.com/

I installed Vector download VL-5.8-std-Gold.iso at http://ftp-osl.osuosl.org/pub/vectorlinux/veclinux-5.8/iso-release/

Good, polished installation with humor included. It has a nice looking xfce desktop which is supposed to run on 64Mb RAM. You’ll want 100-200Mb of swap. They have a good website.

It has a check on the installation files that I would recommend you do when you first start the install. That way you’ll be sure the disk is good. My install took 2.2 Gb of space. I put it on a 5Gb partition.

This is the one I recommend to try on your old computer.

Please post in the LBo Forum or edit this page to let us know what you have been able to use on old hardware.