WTF?! NO floppy in Lucid or in Meerkat!

[Li Li]

On Sat, 2010-09-25 at 03:15 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:

>  * Debian, although recent versions will not run on 80486 and I
> believe Pentium 1 support is going away soon.
>  * Slackware, which I think runs on more or less anything still.
>  * Vector Linux, which aims to be small & quick, but is not exactly
> tiny any more. Based on Slackware.
>  * ZenWalk is fairly small but neither terribly
> legacy-hardware-focussed nor terribly easy to tweak, in my (fairly
> minimal) experience.
> 
> Damn Small Linux is no longer being updated, sadly.
> 
> Of Ubuntu variants:
>  * Xubuntu is not that small any more.
>  * Lubuntu is looking promising. I have run it successfully on a P4 with 256MB.
>  * As Lubuntu is gathering speed, the future of U-Lite is uncertain.
> It may rise again in a new form - I chat to the maintainer regularly &
> he is still deciding what to do.
>  * The current version of Puppy, v5, is called "Lucid Puppy" and is
> now Ubuntu-based as well.
> 
We have a nut here who is happily running CrunchBang Statler, which is
billed as alpha-2, on an old laptop.  Very small memory foot-print and
not very demanding of other resources, but minimalistic. Probably not
for real newbies. You have a choice of iso with openbox or xfce, and can
load the other at install time.

Statler is based directly on Debian now, not Ubuntu.  Looks very stable
at the moment and is probably OK for casual use on older computers.  The
whole of Debian Squeeze seems to be available to it, so you can make of
it what you will.

There's also a new variant of Puppy called Quirky which looks
interesting.

These low spec Linuxes should attract some government support because
they could help keep slightly obsolete computers out of the waste
stream.  Anything that came with Win95 or Win98 should still be useful
(and safe to use) with one of these, given only minimal upgrades (maybe
an optical drive for the really old ones).  

For anything that meets Liam's specification "can happily run XP," even
full Ubuntu, Fedora or whatever will work and slightly lighter things
like Lubuntu will feel fast. A huge opportunity, apparently mostly going
to waste (pun intended).


-- 
Lilly
godbless --everyone --no-exceptions
Linux 2.6.32-21-generic Linux Mint 9 Isadora, Gnome 2.30.2