Alternative WM on Xubuntu? or other lightweight distro?

[Scott Elcomb]

On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 4:42 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>  One of my co-workers has two children.  She also has two older laptops
> at home that are too underpowered to run current Windows.  You can see
> where this is leading to.  One is a P4, and will probably be able to
> handle Xubuntu, the "lightweight desktop" version of Ubuntu.  The other
> is a P3.  I know from personal experimentation that a P3 with 128 megs
> of ram is *NOT* up to handling even Xubuntu.
>
>  Can you put in blackbox or fluxbox as the WM for any of the ?Ubuntu
> variants, and drop the "desktop environment", or should we look
> elsewhere for a lighter distro?  I had Gentoo running OK on an ancient
> Dell P3 desktop with 128 megs of ram, by optimizing the daylights out of
> Gentoo.  But while my co-worker has had a bit of experience as and
> end-user with linux/unix at work, I do not recommend Gentoo as your
> first linux.

It should be possible to switch window managers though I haven't
tried.  Switched to PCLinux OS a while back when my hard drive died.
(I switch distros every now and then to sample flavors.  :-)  Anyway,
can't try it now.

You might try Knoppix[1] or one of it's derivatives though.  I've used
it on older machines.

If Knoppix is really slow (or you're really tight on resources [386's
to P2's]) try Basic Linux[2].  You'll have to add source code and
compile to build it up, but it'll be lightweight.

Pocket Linux[3] can be done the same way.  Pocket doesn't come with an
X Server, but does walk through the building of a custom Linux.

[1] http://www.knoppix.org/
[2] http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/
[3] http://www.pocket-linux.org/

-- 
  Scott Elcomb
  http://www.psema4.com/
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