Re: [PLUG] Recommendations for an OS that will run on 256MB laptop

So here are the results of attempting to get Linux running on old hardware:

No luck

Could be because the hardware is too old and no longer working.

Could be because the hardware is too old and doesn't support modern boot methods (has a Firewire CDROM drive and no boot from USB ability)

Could be I just didn't do something right

Most certainly I decided to stop throwing multiple evenings away trying to get the old Pentium M TabletPC running and move on to newer hardware. Also known as "Shoot the engineer and ship the product".

I gave up on the old and tried something a few decades newer, an ARM-based ROC-RK3328-CC board. Debian came up and ran well (on HDMI screen, X11 remote display, and RDP remote display) but I ran into trouble with some of the specific utilities I needed not being available in ARM flavors. The board also only has 2GB of soldered-in RAM and spent a lot of time swapping. I'll put this board aside for the fileserver project for which it was ordered and try something else.

I now have an Intel NUC from ebay (about $40) on its way with a Core i5 processor and 8 GB of RAM (no drive included so hopefully I can get an old SSD to work with it). The quest continues...

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 9:57 PM Will <staticphantom@gmail.com> wrote:

Arch Linux 32 and puppy Linux are awesome options depending on what you want to do.

-Will C

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 21:48 Martin Cracauer via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
FreeBSD is happily chugging away, doing `make world` compiling LLVM in
C++ with 1 CPU and 256 MB right now.

Martin

Martin Cracauer via plug wrote on Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 09:12:09PM -0400:
> I just tried Debian-testing/amd64 with 256 GB RAM.
>
> Got a kernel panic on boot. "System is deadlocked on memory"
>
> Martin
>
> Steven Grunza via plug wrote on Wed, Oct 16, 2024 at 09:08:11AM -0400:
> > I am looking to use an old laptop for a proof-of-concept project. It needs
> > an OS but only has 256MB of system RAM, which is the maximum the machine
> > will hold. It originally ran Windows TabletPC (basically WinXP).
> >
> > I was thinking of trying Slax but the recommendation is 512MB minimum for
> > Slax.
> >
> > It would basically be a programming station with WiFi or Ethernet
> > connection to report results/statistics using a USB connected programming
> > pod and a USB connected barcode scanner.
> >
> > Any suggestions as to a Linux (or BSD) distribution that would work with
> > only 256MB?