tiny linux distro with decent gui???

[Mick J]

ok.. here's the deal.

I've got an old laptop... pentium 100 with 16 megs of ram and a 1 gig harddrive.

I'm looking for a decent distro of Linux (with a decent, small-footprint GUI) which will install from floppies (since my backpack CDROM is fvxx0red).

I've been looking through the list on the front page but am going braindead trying to find something.

Anyone have any suggestions on what distros will run on a setup like mine?

Thx in advance,

[Mick J]

OH.. also..

I'm only setting this thing up so that I can read email and surf the web when out of town on gigs with my band and on business (I have an old Rockwell 14.4 parallel modem)... and maybe screw around with a basic music tracker program when I'm bored.

anyone? anyone? Beuller? Beuller?

 

[creedon]

You might give Peanut Linux a try.  I don't think there's a GUI, but I believe it will support Lynx, so you can browse at the command line.  You could use mutt or elm or pine for e-mail.  Even if you do find a distro with a GUI, it sounds like your quipment would have a tough time taking advantage of it.

[lost]

ok m0f0, check it out.  youve got a no cdrom, thats not a problem.  Step one make a slackware boot/root disk.  depending on the hardware yu should get away with the color rootdisk.  Now take the slackare install cdrom and put it into one of your desktops.  Share the drive via NFS or configure an FTP server to to allow access to the mount point.  Now in the slackware setup it will ask you for install media, select NFS or FTP and give it the proper path.  Now go through the slackware install.   Dont install emacs damnit, fuck emacs.  Emacs should die.  Fuck emacs developers.  Remove the howtos, dont need them, you can get away with most of the dev package remove shit you know you wont need, this will tak up most of the disk space anyway.  Get rid of eberything that is not base gnome and get rid of kde, fuck that shit.  Since you have little power use window maker or twm.  TWM RULES!  HAHAHAHAHAHAH.  Now you should be set to go.  If you dont know how to install slackware you should learn to install slackware.  Slackware rules!  Dont use any other linux distro, fuck those ween suckers.  You also have the option of doing OpenBSD, same process. boot disk, root disk and just point the install media to ftp.openbsd.org  They like it when you use their site to intall your system. Have fun and read of some of the laptop howtos.  There are various no-cdrom, no-floppy, no-network, no-brains-HOWTOS.  Otherwise you could do one of the more logical things, take the Harddrive out of the laptop and put it in machine with a cdrom and do your install like that.  You will learn a lot about putting your laptop back together  

[voidmain]

Hey lost, you are seriously twisted!  But I love it!  I especially liked the comment about EMACS.     I just read a /.er post saying EMACS is as close to an Office Suite that geeks are going to get (bloated). There's nothing like good old vi (and better yet vim).

Now, I don't know how I missed this original post or I too would have put in my $0.000002 worth.  Slackware is good, I used to use it exclusively but haven't used it lately.  There's nothing like doing an FTP or HTTP install.  I use RedHat (but most distros can do it) and I have installed on many machines without CD-ROM drives using HTTP method (I like that best in the case of RedHat).  Just stick the CD in the drive on a machine that does have a CD-ROM drive and symbolic link the /mnt/cdrom directory under your document root somewhere and yer done (assuming you have Apache configured to follow sym links).  Another option is to create a RedHat/RPMS directory under you web root and copy the RPMS from both CDs under there.  Then just boot the network boot floppy, enter your web server name and URL and your off.

I even had an old laptop with no CD and wouldn't boot the RedHat network floppy for some reason and I came up with an innovative solution.  I found that I could boot another Linux boot disk (I forget the name of it but it's a single Linux floppy sort of designed to be a recovery disk with all the basic tools on it and created and mounted a RAM disk upon boot).  I booted that floppy, created a 2MB partition on the hard drive (/dev/hda1), pulled the floppy out and stuck in the RedHat network install floppy and "dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/dev/hda1", then made hda1 bootable.  All I had to do then was reboot the machine without a floppy in the drive and it booted the redhat network install disk from hard drive thus allowing me to do an HTTP install of RedHat. I was proud of myself on that one...

[shuiend]

setting up Peanut Linux of a etwork would probally be the best idea. Also Void Main is back. What a surprise. Welcome Back

[choasforages]

void main's back? i can live with that.
as for peanut linux, it truly all is their. i really need to install it on something myself and mess with it. but /*chaos's knocks a few times on his wooden desk*/ everything in my room seems to be working great and i don't want to mess with anything. also older version's of debian can install with X in under 500megs.

[pkd_lives]

Check the dates.

[choasforages]

uggg, damn...
i do have an excuse. i broke some ribs, so im loaded up on painkillers so i don't suffer.

[shuiend]

damn that is old. I did not notice that. I wonder how it serfaced ontop then?