by exploder on Sun Dec 28, 2008 12:03 pm
The topic is so interesting because so many of us can get our hands on old machines, usually for free and are faced with the challenge of trying to get them running again. Anticapitalista has made huge strides with IceWM, there is no distribution anywhere that implements IceWM as well. AntiX is light and provides a choice of Fluxbox and IceWM. AntiX requires more than 128 MB of RAM to install but will run on a very low end processor.
Our Fluxbox CE is considered light but I would guess that it needs at least 256 MB of RAM to run well. This edition is feature packed and looks great but it will not salvage the really old machines many of us have lying around. This edition is meant for more mid range hardware where someone wants to conserve memory.
Distributions like Puppy and DSL are great for old hardware but they are a real chore to get installed and take some work to get them to look decent. What I mean is they look ancient out of the box.
Recently I acquired an old HP with on-board Intel everything, a Celeron 700, 30 GB HD and 128 MB of RAM. I tried every light distribution you can think of, Debian net install, AntiX, TinyMe and a whole bunch more! Everything I tried ran slow, would not install or was just too darn unstable. I tried TinyFlux, it was my last hope... TinyFlux not only installed, it was fast, used very little RAM, all the hardware worked and it even had some multimedia capability! TinyFlux even looked nice and modern. I was very impressed!
TinyFlux was built by a guy that had an old laptop that he couldn't get anything to run on. Unfortunately, I was informed that TinFlux's development has stopped... I started a growing thread on the PCLinux forum about this awesome little distribution. TinyFlux should serve as an example of how a distribution should be built to salvage old machines. The only issue I ran into was the automatic partitioning, it gave me really odd sized partitions. Manually setting up the partitions was the answer and it was not very difficult to do.
If we had a CE modeled after TinyFlux it could put a lot of old machines into the hands of people that really need a computer but otherwise could not afford one. I will not sell or give away a machine that I would not use myself, that's my quality control. I used the machine I put TinyFlux on for a whole day and can honestly say that I enjoyed using the machine. TinyFlux comes with a remaster feature and I have been doing some reading about it. If you have an old machine lying around doing nothing check out TinyFlux, you might be pleasantly surprised!