Something that inevitably comes in at installfests is an old machine barely worthy of the title "Doorstop". We had 3 P166 Laptops with 8MB RAM show up at the last one. There is always discussion about the best distro to put on these babies so I've been doing some research in that area. A few I've come up with are DamnSmallLinux(http://www.damnsmalllinux.org), Tiny Linux(http://tiny.seul.org/) and Vector Linux(www.vectorlinux.com). Peanut Linux has also been mentioned but I pretty well disregard that one as it uses KDE3 for the desktop. It's small enough to download over a dial-up but still built for a little more beef than what 10 year old machines have. Over the next couple weeks I'll try these babies out and report back here with my findings. Last night I installed Vector Linux 3.2 on my old Compaq Presario which was my parent's first PC circa 1994. It's been "upgraded" with an Intel Overdrive Pentium running at 180MHz and 48MB RAM. It was originally a P100 with 16MB running the Win95 upgrade. Since then it's been used for different jobs including firewalls, email server and a low-powered intranet web server. I am interested to see how it will handle being pushed back to its desktop roots. Vector Linux is based on Slackware so it definitely isn't for squishy user types who throw up their hands in exasperation when something doesn't work right the first time. The ISO was pretty small, around 250MB. In order to get this to work I had to install an old SCSI card and CDROM I had around as the Compaq's original bit the dust a while back. After that I just popped in the freshly burned ISO and booted from it. Vector offers several kernels to choose from when installing. They have IDE and SCSI versions compiled for both 386 and Pentium CPUs. I, of course, typed pentscsi at the boot prompt and I was off and running. For anyone who has installed Slackware, the install was familiar territory. Using a ncurses based install program, it pretty well steps you through the installation although I wouldn't trust this to a newbie who is clueless about file systems and kernel modules. Network, sound and X configuration is all pretty standard fair for ncurses based installs. The X server is configured using SaX, a graphical front-end. It will even help you create modelines so your screen is always centered and the right size. An hour and a half later, I reboot and am taken to a text login. I login as root, do a passwd and create a standard user. After relogging as the new user I do a startx and am presented with a screen where I may choose the desktop I wish to use. The default presents me with IceWM or XFCE. I chose Ice as I am more familiar with it. The first thing I noticed was just how zippy this box was using a lightweight WM and apps. Using Ice, this thing is faster than it was with Windows95. Opera or Dillo for web-browsing, Abiword for word processing, Sylpheed for mail and xmms for sound media round out a full-featured desktop. My main gripe would be the lack of desktop real estate but that's more a limit of the on board graphics. If I were serious about using this for real work I would invest in a cheap video card with more than 512K of video RAM(800x600 at 16bit baby!). I was unable to really put Vector through its paces last night and did more of a cursory look-over and check of performance. What I saw impressed me, especially in the performance area. While I don't know how this distro would work on Don's 3 laptops(Vector recommends 16MB RAM), I would at least be willing to try installing this baby on just about any old box that walked through the door. I'll try and do a little more research with Vector, particularly in the package and software areas. On the surface it looks to be fairly easy but we will see. I may post a follow-up later. -- The Wandering Dru aka Andy Moore <amoore at loneoakmn.com> _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list