[wellylug] What is the best linux distribution for old hardware ?

[Arnim Littek]

On Fri, 23 May 2003, Nigel Walters wrote:
> I have a couple of old pentium 120's with 32mb RAM and 1G disks.
> What is the best distribution for old hardware ?

Maybe you haven't cast your net that wide, but the xBSDs cover the
small machines reasonably well.  NetBSD, or one I can give more
experience to, is OpenBSD.  I've used OBSD for going on 5 years on old
486 boxen as firewalls (my main 486-25 is often up continuously from
one install of OBSD to the next, typically a year at a time, without a
hassle, and upgrades can be as little as an hour downtime), got the
house server doing print/mail misc. stuff, and have played with OBSD a
bit as a workstation too, on older hardware.  Base install is quite
comfortable in 1G, you can even keep source around with that much
space.

My Linux exposure runs to Gentoo nowadays, which needs a fair bit of
disk space to do it justice, and source compiles of some applications
can take a long, long time.

Arnim.

PS.  Thanks Ewen, for putting up this list.  Yahoo's baggage is
annoying.