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Low Resource Distro and Window Manager for Kids?

Posted by Cliff on from the finding-a-better-place-for-your-low-end-machine dept.

Philljd asks: "Computers 4 Kids is an organization run by the IT &amp ;CS department of Wollongong University in Australia that picks up computers from the local area, installs Linux on them and gives them to needy kids. We want to know what Slashdot readers think would be the best choice of distribution and window manager for an average system spec of a Pentium 100, given that the kids are around 10-13."

2 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Ease of install vs. light-ness by forsetti · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Unfortunately, I have not found a lightweight distro which is "easy" to install. Gentoo is great, because it can be uber-optimized, but it is also tough to install. Redhat and Mandrake are easy to install, but are very heavy.
    I'd recommend checking out *BSD. FreeBSD 4.8 runs on pretty skimpy hardware. Throw something like fluxbox on there, and you are ready to go.

    --
    10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
  2. Modern Desktop Environments by ralphclark · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's not really a question of which distribution, as all distributions tend to include the same core packages and you don't have to install what you don't need or what you don't have sufficient disk space, RAM or CPU cycles for.

    The problem with running modern distributions on modern hardware is that modern "integrated desktop enviroments" such as KDE and Gnome, and modern browsers such as Mozilla, are very heavy on features and eye candy, and all that tends to consume the resources listed above.

    For example: I remember running the Fvwm2 window manager on a 2.0 kernel with Netscape 4, on an old 486DX2/66MHz with just 32MB EDO RAM - and it was pretty snappy. Introducing KDE version 1 slowed things down a bit, but a new machine with an AMD K6-II/233Mhz and 64MB SDRAM solved that problem.

    However I'm now running KDE 3.1.1 and Mozilla 1.3 on a 2.4.20 kernel and even though this is on a Athlon Thunderbird/1.2GHz with 256MB SDRAM at 133MHz FSB, I'm having serious problems with memory management and UI response times. My older boxes which I use for file server duties (nothing more powerful than a Pentium/166MHz) are still fine though, even when I fire up one of the older window managers.

    So my advice to you is, if you're hardware limited, to put together your own cut-down distro CD's based an any current distribution you like (Debian would probably be the best for this purpose with Slackware a close second) but leaving out the heavyweight desktop packages (those which come with an object framework and a bunch of background demons) and all the Kapplications and Gapplications that require them.

    Does this suck? Yes, it does. You can blame the lazy programmers who don't give a damn about memory requirements or people with older hardware.

    The good news is that you can still have all the server packages, all the nifty GNU command-line stuff, gvim, a good modern lightweight browser (Phoenix/Firebird?), all of Perl, a lightweight desktop like Fvwm2, xv for viewing images, a load of basic X and Motif apps...all the functionality is there, in fact all you are really missing is fancy motion video viewers and some worthless eye candy.