Best OS for Pentium II?

aPanzerIV

Daemon Poster
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I'm really bored, quiet frankly I haven't been on here lately, I decided to start working on a random laptop my grandfather has, its a Compaq Armada 7800 with the following specs:
266mhz Pentium II MMX
224mb ram (128+64 and 32 onboard?)
S3 Virge/MX
no hard drive/caddy, but i have a 4gb usb drive and a 20gig hdd waiting for use
CD-Rom

I thought about putting on windows 2000, but that seemed too generic and easy. I'm currently downloading Ubuntu 5.10 after having some fun with 12.04(idk why the f* I even tried that XD).

I've been looking up some stuff for it, at first it looked bleak and option-limited, until i found the massive world of linux-distro's.

What would run the best/fastest/most fun/usable/user-friendly/etc on this machine, I plan to add a wireless card via PCMIA.

I'm currently looking at:
- puppy linux
- DSL
- Lubuntu
- Ubuntu 6 and previous
- Windows 2000
- SliTaz

Any help appreciated :)
 
Try Linux Mint, its quite nice :)

As to system spec to run Linux Mint

I'm running it on Pentium M 1.0Ghz underclocked at about 600Mhz. Works fine and everything's fast.

It works fine on my machine with 512MB RAM

4. What is the smallest amount of hard disk space that Linux Mint should be installed to?


I'd recommend 10GB, although I'm sure it takes less than that after install.
 
The problem is I can't even get into bios, i've pressed every button on that keyboard and it does nothing.
 
What DE were you using in ubuntu 12.04? If you stick with unity or gnome 3 on that hardware, you're gonna have a bad time. On my atom netbook, I'm currently using ubuntu with XFCE 4. Runs great. You could also try LXDE if you want something even more lightweight.


As far as booting USB, no way that old hardware will support it. If you search around, there used to be some USB boot floppies that worked on at least some hardware.
 
I would find a new project. Any linux distros you put on there would be outdated. Therefore vulnerable to all the linux malware that is out there. Before anyone replies that linux is virus free Google exploit db. There is plenty of exploits for linux. Working with 224 mb of ram limits your choice. I'd sell it on ebay. Start a different project. That's just my opinion.
 
I would find a new project. Any linux distros you put on there would be outdated. Therefore vulnerable to all the linux malware that is out there. Before anyone replies that linux is virus free Google exploit db. There is plenty of exploits for linux. Working with 224 mb of ram limits your choice. I'd sell it on ebay. Start a different project. That's just my opinion.

This is only the case if you go for distros with very flashy interfaces, like stock ubuntu, debian, mint, etc. There are plenty out there that use an up-to-date kernel but run far more minimalist interfaces. The one I'd recommend for newer users is Lubuntu 12.04. It should run fine on a pentium II, though most newer programs will probably give it a very hard time.
 
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