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TinyFlux saves the day!

Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2008 11:31 am
by exploder
Recently I was given an old HP computer, Celeron 700 with onboard Intel everything and 128 MB of RAM. I tried every light distribution I could find to make this thing usable. Debian net install, AntiX, TinyMe and a few others. Everything I tried either ran too slow or did not have much functionality.

I was looking through the list of operating systems for old computers last night and saw TinyFlux and thought to myself, why not I have tried everything else? Much to my surprise, it installed without a hitch and all of my hardware worked perfectly! I was almost in shock when I saw that the ViewSonic monitor I am hooked up to was set up with the right resolution and refresh rate! No distribution has ever set up this monitor properly before.

The installed system is quick and responsive and the default look was attractive. Multimedia playback was possible! Flash was installed and working with YouTube, Shoutcast pls files played and these sites were even bookmarked by default! Keep in mind that this is on a 9 year old computer.

The choice of default applications is good, everything is light but very functional. The kernel that is used does not have a problem with the BIOS being old as most light distributions do. TinyFlux is the most well thought out distribution I have ever tried for salvaging old computers. Everything works as it should so I am not going to go update crazy and break this install. Memory use is excellent, about 50 MB of RAM at start up. Something else I found interesting, the browser used is an old Mozilla RC. Old or not it is very functional and beats using Dillo. (Dillo is included by the way.)

If you have an old machine that is just gathering dust or you just can't find anything that will run on it, I highly recommend giving TinyFlux a try!

You can find links to download TinyFlux here.

http://pcfluxboxos.wikidot.com/tinyflux

Re: TinyFlux saves the day!

Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2008 7:09 pm
by Husse
What about partitioning tools in it.
I was thinking of if one could use it to create a swap partition for boxes with slightly more but still too little memory for the fluxbox CE

Re: TinyFlux saves the day!

Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2008 7:46 pm
by exploder
What about partitioning tools in it.
The default layout for partitions is odd, it created a huge boot partition and a much smaller Home partition. I used the manual partitioning and created more reasonable sized partitions. TinyFlux installs where others fail because it is built to have a very small memory footprint. The best option for the Fluxbox CE would be an alternate install CD.