What a waste -anyone wanna restart?

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Fred

Re: What a waste -anyone wanna restart?

Post by Fred »

alexjamestodd,
Standard mint , but with everything removed except the mint specific apps and synaptic

The goal - a lighter mint that you can build and customize to your hearts desire
Presto... Changeo, Your wish is granted! :-)

Pick any version of Mint or any other flavor of Linux you please. Remove what you don't want, add what you do want, and customize to your hearts content. That is the beauty of Linux. You don't have to beg some company or organization to give what you want. You can do it yourself.

You as a user have the power to make it into anything you want. :-)

Fred
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exploder
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Re: What a waste -anyone wanna restart?

Post by exploder »

alexjamestodd, I get where you are coming from. If you look through the forum you will see where I was looking for very light distros for old machines with limited RAM. Blahblahblahx was trying to build a mini edition but real life had to come first. This is completely understandable, things like family, work and schooling have to take priority. The idea Fred proposed will work if you have a decent machine to start with but if you are installing on an old machine with limited RAM you need something minimal from the start.

TinyFlux was the only distribution I could get to install on a pc with 128 MB of RAM. TinyMe would freeze during the install and the dock and desktop icons were unstable, (they kept vanishing from the desktop). The kernel a light distribution uses is a factor too. If the kernel is too new it has problems with a BIOS that is pre 2000. Puppy Linux would be good but it has no partitioner, so the drive has to be ready before the install.

AntiX provides base installs where you build the system how you want it. I have seen Mepis community members build their own custom versions of Mepis with a variety of desktop environments using the AntiX base install. I mention this because they are the only pure Debian distro that is doing this with a high success rate right now.Making pure Debian install from a Live CD is no easy task normally.

I checked out Icebuntu and it looked promising but seemed incomplete to me. It was light enough but I could not shut down or restart from the Live CD without using the terminal.AntiX proves IceWM can be awesome and attractive. I would go as far as to say they lead in the use of it. I looked at distros like Fluxbuntu and many others but the minimum requirements were too high or they ran at snail speed. The very best truly light distros were TinyFlux and AntiX.

Sorry for the long reply but I have been seriously looking for truly light distros to salvage old machines. I have been experimenting with desktop environments and applications for a couple of months now on old hardware to find the right combination for usability and performance on old hardware. As I see it, it could be done but it could not have things like mintUpdate running in the background. Old versions of Netscape work best for web browsing because you can still have multimedia playback with limited RAM. Firefox 3 is too big and bloated for 128 MB of RAM and multimedia is out of the question using it.

Well, I have rambled on log enough! Just pointing out what I have found. :mrgreen:
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linuxviolin
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Re: What a waste -anyone wanna restart?

Post by linuxviolin »

exploder wrote:The very best truly light distros were TinyFlux and AntiX.
Hmm have you tried SliTaz ? I guess it is at least as light as these if not even maybe lighter... :roll:

About the stable version:
A minimum 128MB of memory is recommended to use the main LiveCD. 64MB is needed for the "slitaz-loram" flavor and 16MB for the "slitaz-loram-cdrom" flavor.

With the slitaz-loram flavour, the system is less responsive, but allows you to graphically install SliTaz on very old machines. Once installed, Slitaz works well with a minimum of 16MB memory, but forget about using Firefox to surf the web - you'll have to use the text based 'links' for example.
About "cooking" version (a LiveCD in "a constantly evolving version, fully usable, it allows you to test the latest improvements and packages, ask for new features or report bugs to help us to prepare for the stable version".)
This version requires at least 160 Mb to boot and run properly, we offer loram flavors for machines with less resources. (...) The loram flavor can start SliTaz on machines with very little resources and needs only 64 MB, the loram-cdrom requires 16 MB and ejects and/or uses the cdrom and loram-cdrom-sqfs can boot using only 10 MB and a little swap memory, but is unable to release the cdrom.
K.I.S.S. ===> "Keep It Simple, Stupid"
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." (Leonardo da Vinci)
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." (Albert Einstein)
exploder
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Re: What a waste -anyone wanna restart?

Post by exploder »

Thanks for the useful information linuxviolin! I am downloading slitaz now to take a look. Thanks!

Edit: I installed a cooker version of slitaz on the old HP with 128 MB of RAM. The pc ran quick and only used 30 MB of RAM at idle! The included applications were as good or better than TinyFlux. I saw there is a remaster feature and when time allows I will be trying it out.There is no account selection in the install routine but it is not much of a problem considering how small the iso size is and how well the installed system ran.
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Re: What a waste -anyone wanna restart?

Post by ibm450 »

exploder wrote:Thanks for the useful information linuxviolin! I am downloading slitaz now to take a look. Thanks!

Edit: I installed a cooker version of slitaz on the old HP with 128 MB of RAM. The pc ran quick and only used 30 MB of RAM at idle! The included applications were as good or better than TinyFlux. I saw there is a remaster feature and when time allows I will be trying it out.There is no account selection in the install routine but it is not much of a problem considering how small the iso size is and how well the installed system ran.

any update on this Slitaz?
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kneekoo
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Re: What a waste -anyone wanna restart?

Post by kneekoo »

SliTaz is developed by different people, not Mint's developers. According to the SliTaz roadmap, the next version will come on March 2010.
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