[PLUG] Looking at distros for old desktops

[Arindam]

On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 8:38 PM, Shridhar Daithankar
<ghodechhap at ghodechhap.net> wrote:
> On Sunday 10 January 2010 14:16:25 Arindam wrote:
>> The other system for which I am doing this distro hunt has 512 Megs.
>> It tends to be a little slow with the FreeBSD 6.1 that it currently
>> has (this is from 2006). Given Ubuntu's similarity with Debian, was
>> wondering if it will be any different. Was wondering there is a distro
>> still around which can be trimmed adequately to be performant on this
>> machine.
>
> I have run arch linux on a 1G machine with KDE4 and a windows VM of 256MB.
> Although VM brought it to a slower side because it starts hitting swap, so
> long as you keep using VM continuously, you won't notice a thing.
>
> 1G is plenty. 512 is sufficient. 256 is where things get interesting :) (I
> lost context of original post, so dunno what RAM that system has)
>

This is a PIII 733 MHz with 512 Megs RAM (that's the highest the
Mercury Motherboard with Intel 815e can support).

I guess I will use XFCE or even some minimalistic stuff like Fluxbox.
I downloaded Debian 5 (Lenny) first 3 cds (1.88 gigs in about an hour
and a half using Jigdo) so thinking of building this up from the
Debian bases installation as Aditya suggested.