What Linux OS can I install on a old IBM laptop with a 4GB hard drive and 32 Meg RAM?
Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at
12:00
What Linux OS can I install on a old IBM laptop with a 4GB hard drive and 32 Meg RAM?
Tagged with: hard drive • laptop • Linux • meg ram
Filed under: Linux
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I believe Puppy Linux and DSL are both designed for small, underpowered machines.
Be aware that pretty much any Linux can be installed on this machine (I’d go with Debian), provided you don’t want a GUI. It’s the GUI that’s the problem, because 32MB RAM is pretty low nowadays. Still, you might can squeeze a minimal X and small window manager on that, like Icewm or fluxbox or twm. But I think you can forget KDE and Gnome.
almost all of the linux versions can load up so go get one
make sure you go with X86 version…
Take a look here because this is a good list of linux distributions (different linux OSs are called "distros"):
http://distrowatch.com/
I recommend Puppy Linux: http://www.puppylinux.org/
It is really small and doesn’t need a really powerful computer "runs happily on old Pentiums with as little as 32Mb RAM" .
Damn Small Linux also looks like a good solution: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
I have also used slax ( http://www.slax.org )but, I do not think that it will run well on your computer.
I think you should just try them all out and see which one works best because that is what is so special about linux – all the distros are built to suit different needs.
I hope you allready know how to install and use these OSs, if not I’m sure you can find some help on those sites.
I hope this helped you! Good Luck!
Check out DSL and Puppylinux.
I think puppylinux looks better, but DSL gets the job done too!
http://www.puppylinux.com/index.html
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/