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Lightest of the Light Linux

Posted by michael on from the he's-not-heavy-he's-my-brother dept.

An anonymous submitter writes: "This looks kind of interesting for those who want to run a feather weight Linux on really old hardware."

9 of 391 comments (clear)

  1. I would like to .... by Wild+Bill+Hickock · · Score: 3, Insightful

    run feather weight Linux on my brand new hardware. Imagine how fast that would be !!!

  2. Older OS's?!?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What's wrong with using an older OS on older hardware?

    MS-DOS etc all had X-servers that used little memory + other useful tools.

    You'll find little advantage in squeezing linux on really old machines.

  3. Feather weight OS's by AcquaCow · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think it would be really nice if for once, operating systems tried for a lighter approach to their installs. I know most unixes provide base, custom and full installs, but perhaps someday MS would like to try a light install. Give me XP w/o the Fisher Price colors, w/o the various menu display methods. Stop trying to sell your OS based on features that should be optional. Start trying to sell your OS because its good, not because it has 300+ ways of displaying the same thing. Do something and do it right damnit.

    -- AcquaCow

    --

    up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
    *makes note to limit user processes...
    1. Re:Feather weight OS's by AcquaCow · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah, I played with 98lite for a tad. Quite nice. The thing is, third parties need not do this. The maker of the OS needs to do this.

      -- AcquaCow

      --

      up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
      *makes note to limit user processes...
  4. Re:Don't run a GUI for a start. by danamania · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Real sys admins use a command line anyway (JOKE).

    IMHO It's not such a bad joke to run a machine command-line-only for a while, or permanently. The greatest service you can do to your general knowledge of all things computing, is use a broad range of machines/interfaces outside your common experience. When I started with linux, I just accepted it was mostly commandline stuff (that was a year ago) - and for my uses, it mostly still is. I've run PCs, Macs, Linux from only a command line, Linux with a GUI, Amigas, Dos, Windows, Netware - a bit of everything.

    Jump into the command line-only thing for a while. run something lightweight on a 486 and enjoy the learning experience :)

  5. low resources by oh · · Score: 3, Insightful
    On the resource side, I had 12 MB of memory and a 540-MB hard drive to work with.


    My first linux install was a 486DX2, witn a 66Mhz chip, 4Mb of ram, and I was installing onto an 80Gb hard drive.

    Before this sounds like a "When I was a Boy" story, I could install X and gcc, but not at the same time. When I say I could install X, it would run ... If anyone knows the screensaver "flame", I couldn't get it to update faster then once every 5 seconds, no matter what I tried.

    Just because something is possible, doesn't mean you want to do it.
    --
    Democracy isn't about no one telling you what to do. It's about everyone telling you what to do.
  6. Re:BSD's to the rescue by AndroidCat · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Umm, this isn't a flame, but why a 286? Three years ago, you could dumpster-dive for all the 486's you could cart away. (With memory and video even, since it was of no use in newer systems.) I hate to think on what the current "state-of-the-dumpster" is.

    That said, Mark Williams used to have Coherent 286. Proprietary, but not bad for its day. The company is long gone, but someone might have a copy. I used Coherent 386 for a few years until MWC died and Linux stablized.

    --
    One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
  7. Re:cobalt qube by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The point was that people often use more computing hardware than they need for their specific task.There's no need to go and buy a brand new pc if your going to share a few mp3's or documents with some people. Obviously a website servicing several thousand people is going to need more hardware than a 10 user fileserver.

  8. uClibc is not going to replace glibc by KidSock · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I see a lot of positive comments about uClibc and it may work great for you but uClibc has a few sticky points. There are current issues with scanf, floating point format strings with printf, strcol, i18n support (e.g. iconv), some networking stuff, no threads, etc. This is great if you're building little commandline utilities like busybox but don't expect to be able to run something like a Java VM.