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Linux Suggestion
mtxblau - Jan 28, 2004
  mtxblau Jan 28, 2004
I have a thinkpad, PII 300 Mhz that I want to use as a file server. I have win98 Lite on it now, and that's fine and such, but even that crashes once in a while.

Essentially I want a distro that runs a GUI and Samba, between 500 and 800 MB (preferably the latter), can run decently on a PII 300Mhz w/ 160MB and that's it. No sound, nothing else specific. Decently equals WinXP performance on the same machine (essentially, not a high standard).

Anyone have suggestions? It's really just a size concern.

 Des-ROW Jan 28, 2004
Fedora?

 ExCyber Jan 28, 2004
I'd recommend a conservative Debian install, or maybe Gentoo.

 mtxblau Jan 28, 2004

  
	
	

		
		

			Originally posted by Des-ROW@Jan 28, 2004 @ 01:49 AM



 Fedora?


No, never again. Ok, maybe when Yarrow 2 comes out. But not now.

Has anyone ever heard of Peanut Linux? It seems to fit my requirments, and has the PCMCIA support... though it's not really a mainstream release...

 IBarracudaI Jan 28, 2004
slackware

 it290 Jan 28, 2004
Peanut is supposed to be pretty good. I wouldn't recommend Gentoo for a machine that slow, personally, so I'm going to have to go with ExCyber and say Debian. I've put that on several older machines, both Macs and PCs, and it works well. But yeah, slack is excellent also if you prefer that style.

As for GUI environment, I would do a fairly barebones type setup (no GNOME or KDE). I've used Enlightenment to good effect on similar boxes, or for more speed, fluxbox and blackbox are both good.

For a really 'micro' distro, this one is supposed to be good, although I'm not sure about Samba:

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/...

Knoppix is another nice, bootable distro that's a bit larger.

 IceDigger Jan 28, 2004
I HIGHLY recommend Xandros.

xandros.com

 it290 Jan 28, 2004
Wasn't that formerly Corel Linux?

 IceDigger Jan 28, 2004
correct

 kahuna Jan 28, 2004
I agree with IBarracudaI. Slack gives you alot of features with very little bloat. You will never fit in gentoo on less than a Gig.

At my job, I could squeeze Slackware 7.1 with samba on a <100MB partition. Made a mighty nice print server.

 ExCyber Jan 28, 2004
I was going to recommend Damn Small Linux (DSL), but it doesn't seem to have Samba. I don't know how hard it is to install Debian packages on it (it is Debian-based), if it's reasonably easy it might be an option.

 mtxblau Jan 28, 2004
DSL looks to be the best option for what I want. Especially considering it's so streamlined, it'll run much better than any other distro I can pick up (or so I hope).

I'm going to attempt installing DSL on the laptop. I might just mess around with a third laptop to verify it's usability (all the while maintaining the server).

Thanks for the suggestions! DSL completely slipped under my radar.

 mtxblau Jan 28, 2004
http://developer.berlios.de/projects/bonzai/...

I found this in the FAQs for DSL. Any thoughts?

 it290 Jan 29, 2004
Hmm. Looks like a similar distro that does in fact have samba. Distrowatch shows several versions available, so it should be at least reasonably mature. Probably worth a shot if DSL doesn't offer what you need.

 mrkotfw Jan 29, 2004
LFS. can't get any better than that, or the mighty slackware.