old laptop

FishyMike · Joined: Dec 14, 2005 Posts: 290

I have recently been given an old pentium2 laptop, cant do much with it but throw it on a shelf along with the other dust collectors.
But before I did that I thought I would install some linux os, but which one.
I have tried several and they all drag or hang up along the way. The laptop only has 32 megs.
Now I need one of those distros that runs on air, this one doesnt have much gas to offer.

Gezzer · Posted: Thu Dec 18, 2008 6:35 pm Post subject:

have you tried damn small linux …

link … http://damnsmalllinux.org/

zlim · Joined: Mar 11, 2005 Posts: 2636

Old version of Vector Linux
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/vectorlinux/docs/mis...laneous

zzron357 · Joined: Oct 14, 2004 Posts: 43

Hi Mike, DSL and Vector look good. Puppy Linux might be a candidate as well.
http://www.puppylinux.org/home Seems to me a P2 laptop might have an open
socket for 32 or 64 more Mb. Will it boot cdrom and or floppy? How big is HD?
You might remove HD and connect via usb to another system, and partition HD
and copy linux files to HD. Vector must have ext format and swap. I believe DSL
and I know Puppy can do with fat32 as well, and they both prefer the swap.
Swap maybe 128 Mb, or a little more if available. It seems to me to be an issue
of how to get linux into the HD. Puppy can be copied in, then booted from floppy
if cdrom boot is not possible. Earlier versions of Puppy are available for older
pc's, as also for DSL and Vector. I have Puppy on an older Compaq, dual boot
with win98, with 64 Mb ram. The 2nd ram slot is bad. Nice big 6 Gb HD and cdrom
boots, so partitioning with Puppy (Gparted) is easy. Now like 3.4, 2.2 and 400.
Best wishes, zzron
Is USB available? Copy Puppy to flash drive and use floppy to boot usb.
Compaq laptop 433 MHz