Light Weight Distros

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Saint_Technika

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I'd like to know whether lightweight distros like slitaz do have as many packages as the likes of ubuntu or does one have to go back in time to earlier ubuntu distros for old hardware?
:whistle:
 
Found this:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements

Ubuntu Desktop Edition
700 MHz processor (about Intel Celeron or better)
512 MiB RAM (system memory)
5 GB of hard-drive space (or USB stick, memory card or external drive but see LiveCD for an alternative approach)
VGA capable of 1024x768 screen resolution
Either a CD/DVD drive or a USB port for the installer media
Internet access is helpful
Click to expand...
 
http://pkgs.slitaz.org/
http://repos.slitaz.org/

Check if they have all the packages you generally use.

That said that PC is a dog and using a web browser on it is going to be a pita. Scratch around for some RAM and the situation will greatly improve to the point where you can run something like archbang on it.
 
Saint_Technika said:
Mostly educational: Kiwix + wikipedia, klavaro, marble, sagemath, python, okular, calibre, shutter, gimp, pidgin
Click to expand...
gimp is relatively heavy in my experience.

I imagine it will be glacial on 256MB.

Is Yellowdog still a thing? That was pretty light. Used to run on PS3s. Similar specs to the PC mentioned.
 
riscbroker said:
I don't know what apps you need, but if you want something really light:

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
Click to expand...
http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page will blow your dsl out the water for lightness any day!

It should run on most computers, ranging from 256MB old PIII systems with pre-configured swap to the latest powerful boxes. 256MB RAM is recommended minimum for antiX. The installer needs minimum 2.7GB hard disk size.

I've run it on a ancient Dell laptop with 64mb RAM...

antiX-Mepis FTW!
 
Last edited:
Two questions:

1. Define lightweight? Do you mean something that comes with a featureless window manager and a small number of packages? Or a distro with only the bare essentials compiled in?

2. Does it matter how few packages a distro offer if it offers everything you need?

FWIW, Debian - even in its current version - has always kept things light. Packages are compiled with various options, but split so that you don't have to install everything and the kitchen sink. You can change the behaviour of apt to not installe recommended packages but only required ones [1] for dependencies, keeping things quite small. It practically every window manager you can think of - from twm to KDE and everything in-between.

[1] Edit the following block in /var/cache/debconf/config.dat

Code: 
Name: debconf/priority
Template: debconf/priority
Value: high
Owners: debconf

as follows:

Code: 
Name: debconf/priority
Template: debconf/priority
Value: critical
Owners: debconf

Do this on a fresh minimal install, then apt-get update and be on your way.
 
koffiejunkie said:
Two questions:

1. Define lightweight? Do you mean something that comes with a featureless window manager and a small number of packages? Or a distro with only the bare essentials compiled in?

2. Does it matter how few packages a distro offer if it offers everything you need?

FWIW, Debian - even in its current version - has always kept things light. Packages are compiled with various options, but split so that you don't have to install everything and the kitchen sink. You can change the behaviour of apt to not installe recommended packages but only required ones [1] for dependencies, keeping things quite small. It practically every window manager you can think of - from twm to KDE and everything in-between.

[1] Edit the following block in /var/cache/debconf/config.dat

Code: 
Name: debconf/priority
Template: debconf/priority
Value: high
Owners: debconf

as follows:

Code: 
Name: debconf/priority
Template: debconf/priority
Value: critical
Owners: debconf

Do this on a fresh minimal install, then apt-get update and be on your way.
Click to expand...

A lightweight Linux distribution is a Linux distribution that uses relatively few resources, which may result in performance improvements especially on old computers with slower CPUs and less RAM.
 
Saint_Technika, I'd be interested to know how this project turned out. Did you get something going on this hardware, and how did it perform?

I would guess that the 256MB of memory is by far the biggest constraint. Depending on what you want to run, you might even be better off buying a single board computer (like a Raspberry Pi) than trying to find something to run within that constraint ;-)
 
Perfect Canidate for a Dos PC with old Dos games with a legendary Dos Menu, Or Windows98 if you want to get fancy :-)
 
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