WTF?! NO floppy in Lucid or in Meerkat!

[Liam Proven]

On 25 September 2010 16:08, Li Li <lili_lilly at charter.net> wrote:
> 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 Damn Small Linux is no longer being updated, sadly.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.

I tried CrunchBang 9.04 on my elderly Thinkpad X31 laptop. It worked
well & I spent a happy few days tweaking it to be "just right". It was
fun.

But actually, it was not significantly quicker to boot, run, load
programs or anything than actual Ubuntu.

And call me decadent, but I *like* niceties like desktop icons
appearing automagically when I insert a USB thumbdrive & stuff like
that. I am perfectly capable of popping open a root shell, creating a
mount point, quickly checking the kernel log for the device name &
mounting it, but dammit, it's the 21st century & why *should* I?

Right-clicking on stuff & picking "send to" & things like that are
very convenient. I missed them.

So I gave up on it.

I also tried raw Debian, but it took hours of painstaking work to get
wireless, Flash, Java and so on working. Life's too short.

The new Crunchbang sounds like it may offer the best of both worlds. I
just don't like alpha releases much. Frankly FOSS is often released
half-done anyway - the current LTS Ubuntu features a beta bootloader!
I prefer something at least relatively "finished". It's been a long
time since #! α2 - 3 months now - & I am getting impatient for at
least a β version!

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

This I've not heard of. Thanks, I shall investigate.

> 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).

I agree. At least late-model Win98 machines - say a 350MHz or better
Pentium II, most of which can take 192MB of 256MB of PC100 SD-RAM
which costs nothing these days - can still be perfectly capable little
computers. OK, they won't really do YouTube and the like, but for
basic web browsing, email and chat, they're still usable.

> 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).

Agree. Last week, I was working in a fairly major company. 2 of the
office workstations were old Pentium 4 machines with XP, one with
256MB RAM and one with 512MB. The 512 ran Ubuntu OK, whereas Lubuntu
ran better on the 256MB one. Enough CPU power, just not enough RAM.

-- 
Liam Proven * Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk * GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
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