A mini edition?

[4thwall]

Yeah its called antix mepis.

[yogi]

well antis is just mepis with icewm and fluxbox. Mint mini would be gnome with openbox instead of metacity, all the codecs, and all the custom mint tools including envy. All in a sub 350mb ISO.

[capricornus]

I just logged in with this idea: a MiniMint or a MintyMini, or something like AntiX or TinyMe, but of course much better because of the flavour.
Give me the basics, with an XFCE that incorporates CrossOver when installed. The only other thing I need is an updated Firefox and VLC. It will save us server time and load, download cost (in Belgium I still pay for a download), and cpu-energy (every Watt counts these days).

[capricornus]

"AntiX is just..." and someone else will add "Mint is just..." I think Mint might learn from anticapitalista. She joined nice aspects of Debian, Mepis and Sidux in to one nicely designed OS, fast, rather complete, not so rigid as Sidux, and fit for older pc's without burning up their cpu's. What anti claims could be tru, my wife noticed yesterday: during 8 hours of running om my living room-Athlon2000-laptop, we hardly heard the ventilator. With Mint and XUbuntu, is comes on more often, with Drake's like PClinuxOS even more,reason to abandon the latter downstairs. And what anti claims too: it IS swift on older pc's. In eco-thinking-mind-frames, that could be interesting: how to spend less energy in not-yet-to-be-thrown-pc's.

[Zwopper]

Breathing life into an old thread...
This is interesting.
Especially if it's based around LXDE or Openbox.
Sort of like the Mint version of SliTaz or #! Crunchbang Linux.

[exploder]

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!

[changturkey]

May I suggest Fluxbuntu, Icebuntu, Crunchbang, as bases?

[exploder]

changturkey, is there a download ink for Icebuntu? I found the blog and information about the software selection.

Edit: This page says Icebuntu does not exist yet.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DerivativeTeam/ ... s/IceBuntu

Edit 2: Found Icebuntu here!

http://hosted.filefront.com/markp1989/

[exploder]

I tried out Icebuntu from the Live CD. The system looked clean but it is lacking in some areas. There was no way to shut down or restart from the Live CD. The web browser is Kazehakase and I was really impressed with it.The browser was light, fast and did an all around good job. This would be perfect for an older machine!

I have tried Fluxbuntu in the past and was not impressed with the memory use and it was sooooo slow. I will have to look at Crunchbang and see how it works.