BigGov

Browsing Ebay one night recently I ended up purchasing a nice little laptop with no operating system for $40. 133 mhz Pentium I, 32 MB RAM, 1.3 GB Hard Drive.

Everything on it works, but there is just no OS.

I plan on learning Linux/Unix in the near future and I was wondering if it would be possible to run a distribution of Linux/Unix on this laptop.

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One day an Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman walked into a pub together. They each bought a pint of Guinness. Just as they were about to enjoy their creamy beverage, three flies landed in each of their pints. The Englishman pushed his beer away in disgust. The Scotsman fished the fly out of his beer and continued drinking it, as if nothing had happened. The Irishman, too, picked the fly out of his drink but then held it out over the beer and yelled "SPIT IT OUT, SPIT IT OUT, YOU BASTARD!"

Latch

You can....


unfortunately, distros like Mandrake/Fedora come with a lot of stuff, a lot of which could hurt your need for speed.

There are things like Damn Small Linux (www.damnsmalllinux.com) which you can play with... you could also see how well the machine handles xwindows/windowing programs with something like Knoppix (www.knoppix.org), which runs completely off the CD.

BigGov

Yea, my roommate is currently using Knoppix, but not because he wants to...

I'm not looking for a full blown, beautiful, over-the-top GUI and everything, I'd be just fine working mostly out of root and getting down and dirty into the inner-workings.

This winter break I plan on learning Linux very thoroughly and by the end to build a Tivo like device using either MythTV or Freevo, so I figure getting a jump start on the Linux basics wouldn't be a bad idea.

[EDIT]

Actually you linked to the wrong site in your post, Damn Small Linux is actually at http://www.damnsmalllinux.org, it looks like a very plausable distro for me, thanks for the help

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One day an Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman walked into a pub together. They each bought a pint of Guinness. Just as they were about to enjoy their creamy beverage, three flies landed in each of their pints. The Englishman pushed his beer away in disgust. The Scotsman fished the fly out of his beer and continued drinking it, as if nothing had happened. The Irishman, too, picked the fly out of his drink but then held it out over the beer and yelled "SPIT IT OUT, SPIT IT OUT, YOU BASTARD!"

trache

I had a Slackware 2.1 distribution of Linux on a 386 with 32 MB RAM and a 103 MB (yes) hard drive. It just barely worked (in fact, I believe I only installed the bare package and perhaps a couple of others).

I hav also had a Pentium 1 133 MHz with 32 MB ram. It worked, again just barely. It took 27 hours to compile KDE version 2.1. Same story, just barely worked.

The one thing I would recommend is a large (in the order of 10GB) hard drive, if you can swap one in. You won't get very far trying to compile programs etc with a small hard drive!

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"You looked at me as if I was eating runny eggs in slow motion." - Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip

Bratwurst

I am also trying to learn linux, I just loaded debian on the original machine I built way back in 1999. Its a p3 550. Put KDE gui on it today.

Anyone know a good linux beginner's book that they can recommend? I want to read up on this a lot, but not have to be sitting at a machine to do so.

Thanks

Dragonlich

I've got Debian running on a Pentium 133, with 64 megs of memory. I also had it running on a Pentium 60 with 32 megs of memory (barely). I use the (faster) machine as a mail and proxy server. So yes, it can be done. I assume I could get the thing to run X-windows and stuff, but that's not needed for a server - I do remote administration using a SSH shell and/or Webmin.

One thing though - putting Linux on a laptop is not as easy as putting it on a regular PC. The reason is that laptops generally have rather exotic hardware. Check the specs before diving in, just to be sure it'll run. You could use Knoppix for that, IF the laptop has a cd-rom...

trache

Linux for Dummies; I'm not kidding. I perused the first edition one day a few years back as a kick to see what they could possibly say about this operating system, and found myself quite surprised that anyone with bar knowledge of Windows could probably pick this OS up.

The fourth edition is sure to be much better and I bet it still includes a copy of Red Hat. Just make sure to get the most recent version of Red Hat. The book is generally how all Linux distributions operate, except for the Red Hat specific information, eg. RPM files.

Running Linux, 4th Edition was very good indeed. I had purchased the 1st edition and while it was sparse, I knew this book was destined for greater things and from the looks of it online, it is.

After that, get rid of Red Hat and be glad you did. Seriously, RPM-based distributions suck. If you do keep with Red Hat, compile from source and stick everything in /usr/local

After that, build your own Linux From Scratch using Linux from Scratch, as your operating system will be exactly like YOU want and not how someone tells you it should be - to some extent anyway! :-)

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"You looked at me as if I was eating runny eggs in slow motion." - Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip

bendsley

BigGov: I sure hope you don't plan on having a good understanding of Linux in a period of one "Winter Break". I've been using linux (mostly Debian) for years, and there are still new things that I learn from time to time. Just don't expect its going to be like Windows. To really learn about linux, you need to use the command line; something that is not really done on Windows-based systems (excluding servers).

Linux is not the most friendly OS using command line only. But, once you get used to it, you'll learn to like it. I'm personally a command line junky.

As far as your system specs go, don't expect to run KDE or GNOME or anything else very easily, as you just don't have the speed or space. The core of the OS leaves a very small footprint, but any desktop manager can grow to be quite large.

BRATWURST: The Debian 3.0 Bible comes out the end of November 2004 or first of December. Go buy it when it comes out. It will go in depth into Debian, but also into Linux in general.

Latch: I know how you love your Gentoo. =P

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"You hear the one about the fella who died, went to the pearly gates? St. Peter let him in. Sees a guy in a suit making a closing argument. Says, "Who's that?" St. Peter says, "Oh, that's God. Thinks he's Denny Crane."

-Anders

You might want to have a look at DeLi linux. (Desktop Light), it's made for really slow computers.
Infact it's being developed on a 75MHz or thereabouts I believe.

http://delilinux.berlios.de/

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jonjon42

fluxbox+slack might work avoid kde and gnome like the plague....personally I would just do the command line, since in linux you can do everything from the command line...

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A damn dirty hippie without the dirty part....

Jolt

all you need is to get your hands on an older, less bloated version.

I would probably recommend Red Hat 6.2, Mandrake 6, or Caldera 3.1...

You won't get the latest and greatest stuff, but that'll be new enough to support your hardware.

Unlike some "modern" Loonix distros, the old ones are all blessedly free and downloadable as single CD ISO's...beats the heck out of THREE DVD's...argh...

littlebighead

Sounds like you might not have a CD drive with your laptop. I was in such a situation, so I opted to copy Red Hat ISOs onto a FAT partition and created a bootable install floppy. But then again, 1.3GB is pretty tiny, so maybe your best option is to get a minimal system up and running with networking, and then apt-get or whatever you need to do to get other components installed.

Latch

pffft.. why would you need to buy a book when there's free stuff out there for a better system? Offhand, this is good... you may even learn a thing or two bendsley

bendsley

Well, hardcopies are nice to have. Also, if there were no need for hardcopies, then the industry wouldn't keep mass producing them like they do.

Oh, my documentation beat your documentation up.
http://www.debian.org/doc/

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"You hear the one about the fella who died, went to the pearly gates? St. Peter let him in. Sees a guy in a suit making a closing argument. Says, "Who's that?" St. Peter says, "Oh, that's God. Thinks he's Denny Crane."

Dragonlich

I solved that problem by using the "network install" option. I simply booted from a couple of floppies, and downloaded the rest. It takes some time, but it works.

jonjon42

and if you get an old enough version of slack....all floppies baby...

but really slackware is really the way to go for something like that..it's very minamalistic unlike that fedora/mandrake bloat
gentoo is also minamalistic but I do NOT recommend it for such a slow system unless you have another fast system to compile everything first.

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A damn dirty hippie without the dirty part....

bacon_masta

a debian network install (sarge) offers a good selection of packages, and will run on just about anything