[conspire] Small distros: antiX on a 128MB RAM PII, instead of Puppy Linux

[Rick Moen]

An attendee at Saturday's CABAL brought a cute little workstation box.  It was a
familiar story:  Somebody had intended to throw it out as 'too slow',
and he took it instead, knowing it would be useful with a suitable Linux
load. 

He asked me what distro I'd recommend.  I said: What's the hardware?  He
said Pentium II.  Well, I said, that's a common misconception, that CPU
is the limiting factor.  Generally, RAM is.  How much RAM?  

It took a little checking.  People tend to remember CPU class, but blank
on RAM, even though the latter's _way_ more significant.  Answer: 128MB.

OK, that's low but (barely) usable, even in 2013.  I shuffled through
distros in my head, and said 'antiX'.  And he said 'Not Puppy Linux?"


And that question is the reason for this posting.  Puppy Linux is a
recently fashionable _extremely_ small distro capable of running from
tiny flash cards, Iomega Zip disks, even floppies.  There are several
variants borrowing some features from (variously) Slackware, Debian,
Ubuntu, etc,  Puppy Linux is in the same ludicrously pared-down class as 
Damn Small Linux, Feather Linux, Austrumi, and some others.  An
installed system runs about 50-90MB.

But a PII-class computer tends to have a 2-4 GB hard drive (and can be 
made to very cheaply have a larger PATA drive if desired).  And that's
the point:  Puppy Linux and its kin are way more limited than necessary.
The installed system has built-in compromises easily justifiable if
you're really going to live inside (say) a 200MB hard drive, but
unjustifiable if you have 10x or more that amount of storage -- which
you _do_ have, on any PII box whose Windows installation is to be wiped.


About antiX:

antiX is a variant of the SimplyMEPIS installable live CD, except
without KDE4 and instead providing your choice of IceWM (default)[1],
Fluxbox, JWM, wmii, or dwm -- in other words, various RAM-thrifty window
managers instead of a RAM-sucking Desktop Environment.  Installed image
is something like (approx.) 1GB (cf. Puppy Linux's 50-90MB), _and_ it is
fully compatible with Debian Testing.   No compromises.  You get
immediate access to all of Debian, and the entire system is
Debian-standard.

Mind you, 128 MB is only barely justifiable in even a free-of-charge
computer, these days.  But, for pity's sake, don't cripple it with a 
too-limited distro.

If you _do_ for some reason need a system that is functional with X11
in extremely small amounts of storage (i.e., much smaller than mass
storage of a 1998 workstation), Puppy Linux is fine.


Other interesting options can be found by starting at the DistroWatch
main page's Search function and specifying category 'Old Computers".
Of those, I find these choices (aside from antiX) most interesting:

Bodhi Linux
  Installable live CD
  Based on Ubuntu
  DE is Enlightenment
  Realisitic minimum hardware[2]:  probably 256 MB RAM.  

CrunchBang Linux
  Installable live CD
  Based on Debian Stable
  No DE.  WM is Openbox
  Realistic minimum hardware:  128MB RAM

Lubuntu 
  Installable live CD
  Based on Ubuntu
  DE = LXDE _or_ WM = Openbox
  Realistic minimum hardware: 256 MB RAM

Swift Linux (comments are based on the upcoming version)
  Installable live CD
  Based on Debian Stable and Linux Mint Destop Edition
  DE = LXDE
  Realistic minimum hardware:  probably 256 MB RAM
  
  

[1] Documentation says this is IceWm with 'ROX Desktop', which I am
finding at http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/, and is said to meld
nicely with IceWM to add DE-class drag'n'drop icon functionality to your
desktop.

[2] In the last decade, I notice most distros have been failing to
properly document minimum hardare requirements.  That information used
to be prominently provided.  Figures cited above are in most cases my 
estimates.