[rescue] O/S for 133/150mhz laptops???

[Jeremy Grosser]

I've been playing with older Pentium boxes for a while and have found  
that they are best put to use as low duty servers and network  
appliances. However, as these are laptops I would recommend something  
with a GUI to make them somewhat useful to the average person. Here  
are a few ideas.

Slax (http://www.slax.org/)		A lightweight livecd distro based on  
Slackware.
Debian (http://www.debian.org/)		An old standby. Nothing special.
FreeBSD (http://www.freebsd.org/)	While I've never used it for a  
desktop, I hear it works fairly well.
OpenBSD (http://www.openbsd.org/)	Security conscious distro. Better  
wireless driver support than any other open source OS at the moment.  
Would be nice for turning one of these laptops into a network  
auditing box.

For server use, the same distros work fairly well if configured  
properly. Gentoo could be added to the list if you have a few other  
boxes setup with distcc to help compile times. It took me about four  
hours to install Gentoo and updated packages on a Dual 180 Mhz  
Pentium box with an 800 MHz P3 and a 2.4 GHz P4 running distcc jobs.

You might also want to take a look at FreeDOS (http:// 
www.freedos.org/) for turning one of these laptops into a DOS game box.

Other possible uses: Microcontroller projects, serial console for  
servers, learning x86 assembly, streaming audio player...
--
Jeremy Grosser
synack at csh.rit.edu
www.neohippie.net


On Jul 10, 2006, at 1:28 PM, stephen price wrote:

> Asking for opinions for an operating system for some
> older pentium 133 & 150 mhz laptops.  Ram size will
> range from 32mb to 80mb, all have a 6gb hard disk &
> nice TFT active matrix screens.  All have "real"
> stickers for m$98 & could reload that - but would like
> to see about nicer smaller kernel linux distros etc.
>
> Recommendations ??
>
> Thanks!
> Steve
> ftw tx