Need an OS for an old thinkpad

Mutant Corn

Daemon Poster
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So I need an OS for my fiancee's computer. She's running XP right now, but it takes up too much space on her hard drive (5 Gb) and isn't quite as fast as she'd like it to be. Here's the specs:

IBM Thinkpad 600E
397MHz Pentium II
224MB RAM
USB 1.0 (I had considered USB booting before I saw this)

My first though was Damn Small Linux, but when I tried the live disc, everything was purple...? I couldn't figure out how to fix it, and she, for the most part, doesn't know how to perform any maintenance at all on her PC...so DSL is out.

I then went to Slax, but on their forums I read that it probably won't run as fast as we'd like either. It seems like it'd be easy enough to use, though. Any thoughts?

The only other small OS I know of is puppy linux, but I really don't know a lot about it.

Any help is appreciated...I'm in the dark here :(
 
That's a pretty old computer. If you want it to run decently, you're going to have to go back to 98 or 2000.
 
I don't have any install discs though....and we're both broke college students, so I can't buy one anywhere....

So are there no linux distros what will work?

edit: Didn't MS stop supporting 9X?
 
Where can I get one? All I have is an XP home disc and some random Linux discs...

edit: I'm running Slax from a live disc right now and it seems to do all right...should I try it?
 
I agree with wmorri these are very light OS that should have all you need
a lot of Netbooks run Linux because of it
 
I'll give those a try then, thanks guys :p

edit: So...how long is puppy supposed to take to boot from a CD? It's been going for about 20 minutes now...it was searching for puppy files on the HD for a while, then popped up with "pup_412.sfs not found. Dropping out to initial-Ramdisk console...", and then "/bin/sh: Can't access tty; job control turned off"

:confused:
 
Hi,

What speed did you burn the iso file at? I it seems like you are having a problem with the burn. I might make sure that the md5 files match, then try burning a new cd at the slowest speed possible.

Cheers!
 
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