Best linux distro

I stumbled upon an old Toshiba and what would run best on a Pentium MMX with 64mb of ram. Thanks!

 

Hmm..perhaps DamnSmallLinux, TinyCore?

 

there's also puppy linux, vector, and stx to name a few more..

 

You'll most likely have to setup a Swap partition before being able to successfully boot far into those distros or boot with a low memory option if the distro offers it.

 

I don't know, DSL can apparently boot on a 386 with 8MB RAM.

 

Last week I installed some slackware version on a machine just like that... I don't use the GUI on it, though, just the terminals... I use it only to program (vim) and to make use of its parallel port... ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA8GNSVmHZM).

I found that's a great use for an old machine

 

Another vote for Slackware!

 

I'd go with Slackware, too.

 

You don't need X to do a lot of things on Linux. There's text-based programs for almost everything, including frame-buffered mplayer to watch videos.

 

I tried DSL 4.4.10 this weekend on a couple of prehistoric laptops, an HP Omnibook 800CT Pentium 166MHz 48MB Ram, and an Acer TM600 Pentium III 400MHz 192MB Ram. I did a poor man's or frugal install by manually copy across the contents of the ISO mounted on a loop into a linux root partition and then added a Grub stanza.

You can simulate how little RAM you want with the mem option e.g. mem=16M as a kernel param - it was painfully slow on my old Acer TM600 Pentium III and with the Dillo browser and a terminal it froze on me. My conclusion is that 16MB with the type of install that I did was not usable, so I'm not entirely convinced that the suggested minimum on the DSL Wiki is valid?

On the HP Omni 800CT 48MB RAM, the NeoMagic graphic chipset didn't work with Xvesa and on the XFramebuffer the mouse was unusable and each mouse movement was erratic and caused the right-click menu to appear.

Running the Acer TM600 with 64MB simulated with mem=64MB, that ran quite nicely although nearly all the 60MB (I assume 4MB was being used on the ATI Mach 64 gfx) got used up immediately after boot and a small amount of the Swap partition that it automatically found on the disk. Given that Linux tries to use all the RAM efficiently, I can't tell how much of that memory was file buffer space that could be freed by the OS if needed, but I am going to stick with my gut feeling that 64MB still needs a Swap partition if you are going to run applications such as a browser once you have booted up.

The incompatibility reminded me why I stopped recommending DSL or Knoppix, those distros just didn't work with many of the lower spec computers at work.

 

I never said usable, but bootable.