what WM would run on this skimpy laptop?

[winblowz]

i got my hands on an old laptop (er was it dropped into my lap... not quite sure) that i want to install FC6 onto but i know for sure gnome is out of the question. since i don't have any idea about other WM's i was hoping someone might have a suitable one in mind that i should try.

laptop is a pentium II celeron MMX w/64 megs of ram.

thanks

[Wayne]

i got my hands on an old laptop (er was it dropped into my lap... not quite sure) that i want to install FC6 onto but i know for sure gnome is out of the question. since i don't have any idea about other WM's i was hoping someone might have a suitable one in mind that i should try.

laptop is a pentium II celeron MMX w/64 megs of ram.

thanks

You should be looking at Damn Small Linux (DSL) or Puppy Linux.

I've just installed Zenwalk onto a PII 400, 6Gb disk and 128Mb RAM. I don't think it will go as low as 64Mb though. Xfce 4.4 is a lovely DE if you haven't got the horse-power to run Gnome or KDE.

Wayne

[Thetargos]

Other good options (I strongly recommend XFCE, though) are FluxBox, and any of the *Box family, really, also IceWM is rather good and copes well with limited resources machines like this. It will go as low as 64Mb too (just it is not available in the repos... I think). Also you may want to run your own personalized kernel to make it use a bit less RAM, and you should shut down pretty much any services, unless strictly necessary.

[sailor]

Fluxbox or Blackbox are what I would use...I use BBlean on my windows box, and it does make quite a difference even though it is a decent computer.

[JN4OldSchool]

nope, you wont have any choice here. It HAS to be DSL with Fluxbox. Take it from me, I had the same 64MB and NOTHING else will run graphically on that. DSL can be fun to play with, it is a neat OS. But if you have any big plans for that lappy forget them. It's pretty much worthless. Win 98 would be the most productive thing to put back on it. I'd just turn it into a digital picture frame. I did that with mine and it gives me much more pleasure sitting in a nice teak box on my entertainment center displaying a slideshow of all my family photos then it ever did as a laptop.

[RupertPupkin]

laptop is a pentium II celeron MMX w/64 megs of ram
You won't be able to install FC6 on that; the minimum RAM required to install FC6 is 128MB: http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc6/en_US/sn-ArchSpecific.html

I'd recommend Slackware 11.0 (http://www.slackware.org). It's a full-fledged distro but lean enough to run on your laptop. For window managers, I'd recommend fvwm or WindowMaker first, and if you don't like those then try blackbox or fluxbox. All of those are included with the Slackware installation media. I've run fvwm and WindowMaker on an old P166 laptop with 16MB RAM, and they were both fine (they use only about 3-4MB RAM).

[Thetargos]

Well, another very decent distro you can run on that is one from the Red Hat 7.3/Mandrake 8.x/SuSE 7.x-8.x era. You could theoretically also get a more recent distro to run on that, with all and a newer 2.6.x kernel. It will be more laborious to get that installed, though. GTK 1.2 and GNOME 1.4 should run just fine on that machine too... And believe that's much better than using Win98 (unless you *require* any Windows apps). You could even (again, theoretically) use any of those previously mentioned distros and install newer stuff like newer GlibC and stuff to have it a bit more up to date (i.e, no known security problems, and many, many bug fixes)... But in such a scenario, maybe only Gentoo or Linux From Scratch would suit you.

[joe.pelayo]

That is a pretty old laptop although I can not figure exactly what processor do you have. If it is really a PII perhaps you would be able to install something like FC5 if you had more RAM; if it is a Celeron or a Pentium MMX forget it (it can not be the three) I did that with my old AMD K6-2, but with 256MB though.

I once installed Red Hat 9 in my K6-2 and tried to use Firefox 2.0 on it. The result were frequent Firefox crashes because some libraries were somewhat old for that Firefox version, I did not receive any 'official incompatibility announcement' but it did not work in a reliable way. Just have that in mind to don't become surprised when you use newer packages along with older libraries.

[John the train]

@ winblowz. It might be an idea to Google the brand name/model of your laptop, my Dell is running a P2 and will take a maximum of 256MB RAM, even with 192MB it will run FC6, particularly if you lighten it up as far as possible - Abiword instead of Open Office, xfce rather than Gnome etc. - it all depends whether you think it's worth sinking cash into. I've looked at Puppy Linux and was impressed, but the version I had was a Live CD with install option ( a la Ubuntu ) and I couldn't get the install to work. I believe there is a pure install download available, but can't be sure.