[url]www.salineos.com
Salin OS is a really good one. The guy who made it just did his firs (1.0) release a few days ago. It's Debian-based and uses the Squeeze testing repositories and the XFCE desktop. I've been using it since late last night and I've been enjoying it. Of the Debian-based distros I've tried, I like this one the best (Ubuntu-based distros don't count as Debian-based distros in my book.) If you've got the HD space, you might want to check it out or even just run it in Live mode. You can use UNetbootin (the version in the Maverick repos) to create a USB drive. The version of UNetbootin in the Debian Squeeze repos won't work but the one in the Maverick repos is newer and works. :)
OK, I asked on the forums. Anthony Nordquist, who created Saline OS, said he managed to get it to run on a Celeron M 533MHz with 256MB of RAM. His words: "It runs but not spectacularly well, and with those specifications I would highly recommend using Parole to play music." He recommends at least a 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM.
Thank you so much, Chris. I know it won't work on the old pc I have in mind. Celeron 433MHz processor and 128 mb ram. Any ideas for this one? I'm thinkin' Anti-x......
I see. I don't think I'm the correct person to advise you on this, unfortunately. Aside from that 1998 Compaq with the Cyrix 225, my "older" computer is an AMD Athlon 64 2.40 GHz with 2 GB of RAM. I don't have anything older that survived besides that ancient Compaq (my first PC.)
I'd suggest hitting DistroWatch and trying the search. Under "Distribution Category," select "Old Computers" and see what comes up. antiX is on the list but I have no idea how it would perform on a 433 MHz with 128 MB of RAM becuase I don't have anything like that on hand.
In case you don't have it, here's the link to DistroWatch: DistroWatch
Yeah, RAM is the really tricky part. Someone reported the other day that the graphical installer crashed during install with 256 MB of RAM. I think, once you get past the install of wattOS, it will run on not a lot of juice but it's getting past that part that's a hurdle. Even a graphical installer that doesn't have to load the full desktop in Live mode would help, like Ubuntu has. It's loading the desktop and then running the installer that is killing peoples' machines.
Possible solution: Remember, this isn't Windows. You can run the Live CD on a newer computer and use that to install onto a hard drive that you can then transfer to the older machine. Unlike Windows, Linux will boot when you do that. Just a thought.
Another trick a few people on the Mint forum report having success with is installing a swap partition on your hard drive with Gparted before you start the installation. The installer will use the swap space as virtual ram if needed.
In response to the earlier discussion about SalineOS, I have it in Virtualbox and I am really liking what I see.
The only thing is, Someone said Saline is based on Debian Testing. I thought it was based on Debian Stable.
Mint's LMDE is based on Testing. We should really be busy in the Mint forums when all of those new LMDE users start getting the flood of updates once sid goes stable and a new testing version is started.
Any one tried #! CrunchBang 10 "Statler" r20110207 since it went Debian? Based on Squeeze - there are a few flavours:
- Xfce
- OpenBox
Download either version and with the "cb-welcome" script you can add the other Xfce/OpemBox as a seperate session. I'm here because a few people are talking about WattOS there.