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IMHO, Puppy Linux does the low requirements thing better than Elive.

Puppy Linux

Yup, that's Ubuntu before the suckage added.

  Or Unbuntu with the suck massaged out: http://www.linuxmint.com/

    Too light to contain suck: http://www.archlinux.org/

    Too tiny to hold suck: http://puppylinux.com/

    Got their suck fixed a few releases ago, it's all good now: http://www.fedoraproject.org/

    fixed their suck a while ago too, lookin' good: http://www.freebsd.org/
 
    supports all kinds of desktops that don't suck: http://www.mandriva.com/

    roll your own without the suck: http://www.gentoo.org/

>>>worth switching from Chrome to Firefox

Or SeaMonkey which I've been trying these last few days. It has the same engine as FF4 but with far less bloat (~150,000 vs. ~300,000 kilobytes). Copied from another guy's post yesterday:

Q: Why not use Firefox instead of Seamonkey?

A: "Yes, Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email and news client, Sunbird Calendar, and NVU HTML editor are useful programs. The Mozilla/SeaMonkey suite, with all of this functionality, is about 11M compressed, whereas the separate applications are each about 35M compressed. So, the live-CD, instead of being 60M would be 85M and would be too big to run in RAM in a PC with 128MB.

"Why are the separate applications so big compared with the Mozilla/Seamonkey suite? Simply because the Mozilla suite has a lot of common code shared by each module, whereas the separate applications have to duplicate that code. This creates a gigantic size bloat, not in the spirit of Puppy."

- Puppy Linux FAQ
- Barry Kauler 2006
http://www.puppylinux.com/faq.htm

From the Puppy Linux FAQ:

Q: Why not use Firefox instead of Seamonkey?

A: "Yes, Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email and news client, Sunbird Calendar, and NVU HTML editor are useful programs. The Mozilla/SeaMonkey suite, with all of this functionality, is about 11M compressed, whereas the separate applications are each about 35M compressed. So, the live-CD, instead of being 60M would be 85M and would be too big to run in RAM in a PC with 128M RAM.

"Why are the separate applications so big compared with the Mozilla/Seamonkey suite? Simply because the Mozilla suite has a lot of common code shared by each module, whereas the separate applications have to duplicate that code. This creates a gigantic size bloat, not in the spirit of Puppy."

- Barry Kauler 2006
http://www.puppylinux.com/faq.htm

Instead of big Linux e.g Ubuntu etc, try a smaller Linux such as Puppy, http://www.puppylinux.com/ Approximately 100MB and fast.

You've hit on a key issue in not just small donations but in lots of business models, too. There are problems with most payment methods for small payments.

Small checks through the mail are efficient for the sender, but are terribly inefficient for the recipient. That's even true if a stamp is used to endorse them. Then there's the small but real risk of fraudulent ACH transactions when you send an unknown entity a check. Then there are failed check hassles, too. Even small checks can be insufficient funds if someone's overdrawn already or they could write an old check on a closed account by accident.

Accepting credit and debit cards is pretty efficient for the recipient for larger values, but with fixed per-transaction fees in addition to the percentages, most merchant accounts aren't worth using if a large proportion of transactions are for small amounts.

Sending coin or currency through standard post is fairly efficient, and there's typically a reasonable risk of loss on the part of the sender if the payments are small enough. There are pretty good systems for counting coin and cash. There's an issue of security through obscurity for the recipient, though, since targeting the recipient's end of the mail could score a pretty good chunk. How does one let honest people out in the public know where to send cash while keeping the delivery end secure? A post office box is more secure than the average customer location mail drop, as are slots into a building or a locked customer box. There's still lots of people involved in getting the money there, though. People, even ones screened by the Postal Service for honesty and integrity, are always a possible weak link to security. Some projects have had at least limited success with this process, though. Barry Kauler of the Puppy Linux project accepts cash for mailing CDs to people (and would probably accept donations in cash, too). He accepts US dollars, Australian dollars, and Euros/a>. He recommends PayPal. I hope I haven't hurt the security of this system for him by mentioning it on Slashdot; anyone who's been to the Puppy site could have already known about it.

PayPal is an option. They have similar per-transaction and percentage-of-transaction fees to credit cards. For donations, they require no setup fees, no monthly fees, and no monthly minimum. There is a $0.30 transaction fee on top of the percentage for donation receipts of less than $3000 per month (if this source is timely). That makes single-dollar donations feasible but expensive. Anything less is not worthwhile. I haven't found the pricing info for donations on PayPal's site after a few minutes looking, but the prices listed at that fundraising news site are in line with their commercial payment services.

Amazon has a system that lets any Amazon customer pay you a donation for 5% plus as little as $0.05 if you're a 501(c)(3) non-profit in the US and the donation is less than $10. Check out their prices. They also have a similar low-cost cutoff for non-donation payments and even a micropayment system that tracks payments under $0.05 at 20% with a quarter-cent minimum cost for both donations and sales.

Google has Google Donations which for any US 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6) non-profit (but not other 501(c) subcategories) which follows the standard transaction fees. For organizations that are qualified and are accepted into the Google Grants program, Google Donations processing is free while the organization is in good stand

http://www.puppylinux.com/ http://www.puppylinux.com/flash-puppy.htm

http://www.puppylinux.com/ http://www.puppylinux.com/flash-puppy.htm

>>>The only system where it makes sense to disable swap space is a system with no HDD at all.

Or a system where, when you click on an icon, it opens the windows *instantly* not 1-2 seconds later (because it's retrieving data off the HDD). If you don't know what I'm talking about I respectfully suggest going to here and trying this OS on a bootable CD. You'll be amazed. http://puppylinux.com/

A computer that uses no hard drive caching, and runs completely in RAM, is faaaaaast. Of course with Windows, that means you'd need somewhere around 20 gigabytes of memory. Windows won't work otherwise.

>>>Do you really think the OS is trying it's hardest to make your computer go slower?

Apparently you've forgotten the dark days of Windows 95 or 98, where you would click on an icon, and have to wait 1-2 minutes for the OS to finish thrashing your HDD, due to not having enough RAM to run properly. (Or more recently: Vista or WIN7 on a 256 megabyte machine.)

That's a special case, then, if they use the same portage repositories as Gentoo for all but their distribution-specific files. That means the packages the Sabayon team puts together are the only ones they have to worry about so long as they don't break portage. Any lag from the individual projects to Sabayon for most packages would then be only what Gentoo users would get anyway.

Barry Kauler (the guy behind Puppy) has always worked hard on the automated rebuilding of the distro, including remastering a Puppy CD with a different package selection from an existing Puppy installation. Right now, he's working on a set of programs that will build a Puppy distro from one of a number of other distros (including automatically stripping excess files out of the packages and configuring them for minimal resource usage as much as can be managed). The project is called "Woof", and it will build a Puppy distro from T2, Arch, Slackware, Debian, or Ubuntu in just a few steps. The resulting distro is familiar to Puppy users but is binary compatible with whichever distro was used to build it and can use that distro's repositories. It's still a work in progress, but it's a nice way for a smaller, specialized distro to offer a wide variety of packages with no additional lag time.

I'm not involved in Puppy's development. I am a happy user of it on several of my systems, and I have used the existing tools to make private LiveCD spinoffs for particular systems.

If you want that "Wow" feeling from a machine with those specs you really need to run DSL, DSL-N or Puppy, in order from fastest to slowest, although Puppy is still awfully fast.

IMHO both the mainstream Windows and Linux have simply gotten too bloated for the low spec mobile devices, hence we have things like Moblin. But I don't see how even Moblin can touch something like DSL-N for "wow" speed factor when you can load the entire OS into RAM with the TORAM flag and only be using 100Mb of RAM. So if you are wanting the "wow" speed over the pretty I'd try those three and see which you like best.

I've been giving DSL-N to customers with battery issues and since it is so light on resources you can actually squeeze some more life out of your battery by going with an "ultra low resource" OS like DSL-N. And who wouldn't rather how more battery life than bling bling effects?

Forgot to include a link to Barry's post last month on Puppy boot times: http://www.puppylinux.com/blog/?viewDetailed=00208

Puppy isn't based on any other distro. Its author, Barry Kauler, built it from scratch, and it's architecture is substantially different from any other distro out there. (See http://www.puppylinux.com/development/howpuppyworks.html and http://puppylinux.com/about.htm for details.

There's some amazing architecture there, especially the way the layering of the filesystems works to transparently allow ROM, RAM, flash, and disk to do what each does best.

As of Version 3 (Puppy 4 is current now), Puppy is compatible with Slackware 12 binaries/packages, but it is NOT based on Slack or any other distro, in the way that most distros are.

Puppy isn't based on any other distro. Its author, Barry Kauler, built it from scratch, and it's architecture is substantially different from any other distro out there. (See http://www.puppylinux.com/development/howpuppyworks.html and http://puppylinux.com/about.htm for details.

There's some amazing architecture there, especially the way the layering of the filesystems works to transparently allow ROM, RAM, flash, and disk to do what each does best.

As of Version 3 (Puppy 4 is current now), Puppy is compatible with Slackware 12 binaries/packages, but it is NOT based on Slack or any other distro, in the way that most distros are.

Use either DSL or puppy. I have used both on older hardware and installed on the HDD the boot is very fast. You could probably speed up the process even more if you compiled it for the specific hardware.

I boot Puppy linux in less than 10 seconds, faster than splashtop. No rocket science here :-) Go Puppy!

I am not the type that needs to do big Excel Solver sheets or Matlab simulations while on the go. Why carry more than twice the weight for what amounts to a bigger power draw and little marginal value?

My sentiments exactly. I've got a dual-core desktop at work (which would be idle 90% of the time if I weren't running two instances of Folding@Home). The most intensive thing I do with my laptop is when I remote-desktop to my work box.

I'm beyond low-end. I got an old PII laptop from Retrobox (now Intechra) for under $150 (it would be worth about $10 now, I think), and put Puppy Linux on it. It's a little clunky, but it does everything I need, and it's half the size and weight of any of the new Vista-capable laptops that sell for $1000+.

Puppy Linux http://www.puppylinux.com/ is designed to run on older hardware.
Plus it's very user friendly and extremely easy to modify.
http://puppylinux.com/pfs/index.html and http://puppylinux.com/puppy-unleashed.htm
  It'll even run on a PII system with 128meg of ram and a CD drive, WITHOUT a hard drive!

Puppy Linux http://www.puppylinux.com/ is designed to run on older hardware.
Plus it's very user friendly and extremely easy to modify.
http://puppylinux.com/pfs/index.html and http://puppylinux.com/puppy-unleashed.htm
  It'll even run on a PII system with 128meg of ram and a CD drive, WITHOUT a hard drive!

Puppy Linux http://www.puppylinux.com/ is designed to run on older hardware.
Plus it's very user friendly and extremely easy to modify.
http://puppylinux.com/pfs/index.html and http://puppylinux.com/puppy-unleashed.htm
  It'll even run on a PII system with 128meg of ram and a CD drive, WITHOUT a hard drive!

> What ever happened to minimal?

You would like to have a light Linux distribution? Something like this perhaps:

http://www.puppylinux.com/
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/about.htm
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

http://puppylinux.com/

Teeny tiny, will fit on a 128mb key.

I don't know what percentage of computers will boot USB drives. You can convince most any computer to boot from a floppy, and puppy linux has a floppy image you can use that'll make it boot off usb.

Alternatively you can just burn a multisession CD-R of Puppy, make your changes and Puppy will burn them as a new track. Very cool option, but you need to be at a computer with a burner to save. A CD will fill up eventually, as you can't actually delete anything unless it's a CD-RW. Well, you can delete things so they don't show up, but they're still there on previous tracks.

http://puppylinux.com/development/howpuppyworks.ht ml
http://puppylinux.com/flash-puppy.htm

Just curious, what model, ram and cpu is in it? If you go through with it start a JE and others can help.

http://puppylinux.com/development/howpuppyworks.ht ml
http://puppylinux.com/flash-puppy.htm

Just curious, what model, ram and cpu is in it? If you go through with it start a JE and others can help.

Not really news per se...most of us have known for a while now that Linux is a good strategy for reviving old systems that the latest M$ bloatware won't run on.

I like the PUPPY myself...give it a shot. ^_^