On Thursday 30 October 2003 14:05, Grahame Leon-Smith at Free Computers wrote:
Ian et al
Can we support the FLOSSIE initiative by pre-installing an appropriate version of Linux and OpenOffice on all the computers that we refurbish ?
We have still not been able to find a basic Linux OS that is suitable for a Pentium 1 machine with 31Mb RAM.
Having spent hundreds of hours trying to build something thin enough to run on a 32Mb machine, I think it is fair to say that you cannot build a desktop distribution which will run on that level of hardware that does not make gnu/ linux look like the poor relation to windows. By the time you have X, a window manager and the required underlying services going, there is just no room left to do any useful work without the machine thrashing around in swap. Sorry! That's not to say that such machines are useless. As firewalls, file and print servers, thin clients and for console use, they still can be useful. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll