Member Avatar for Har31n6er

Hi all, my first real post here. I bought this rig:

Gateway OEM PC

192 MB RAM (128MB PC130 SDRAM)(64MB PC130 SDRAM)
20gig HDD
ATI RADEON 32MB SDR
AMD Athlon 900 CPU
Creative Sound card CMI8738/C3DX PCI Audio Device
CD1 =NEC DV-5700A CD ROM
CD2 =LITEON CD-ROM LTN4865
PCI MODEM Enumerator
WinMe Promise Ultra100 IDE Controller
Generic NEC FDD
RealTek RTL8029(AS)-based PCI ethernet Adaptor

Second hand here in Japan. It didn't come with any paperwork, only a few OEM CDROMs, but that doesn't matter too much I guess. I tried SuSE 10 on there but it ran so slowly and randomly locked up. Unbuntu didn't even install due to a blank screen with two white pixels there (the video card probably wasn't supported).

My question (finally) is what Linux Distro would you recommend for this machine?

Cheers in advance

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Short, practical add-on for this thread (summary + next steps, based on the specs in the first post).

With an Athlon 900 and only ~192 MB RAM plus an older ATI card, the fastest path is a tiny, RAM‑light distro or a small live image for testing — upgrading RAM to 512 MB (or at least adding swap) will make any modern distro far more usable. already hit the right pain points (slow SuSE, blank Ubuntu install). and were correct: more memory is the single most effective fix.

Good distro options to try now:

  • Tiny Core — extremely small GUI images that will run in tens of megabytes of RAM; great if you want the smallest possible footprint. (en.wikipedia.org)
  • SliTaz — tiny live images and special “loram” builds for very low RAM systems (live modes that target sub‑256 MB machines). (slitaz-wiki.readthedocs.io)
  • Puppy Linux — practical, live/frugal installs that run in RAM and are beginner‑friendly for rescuing or reusing old PCs. (puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io)
  • antiX (Debian‑based) if you want a fuller desktop but can accept that 256–512 MB (with swap) is the real target for comfort. (antixlinux.com)

Quick test / troubleshooting checklist (do these from a live USB/CD):

  • Boot a tiny live image first (Tiny Core / Puppy / SliTaz) to confirm basic hardware support and responsiveness.
  • If the installer shows a blank screen, boot with the distro’s “safe graphics” or add a kernel boot option like nomodeset to avoid problematic video drivers during install. (discourse.ubuntu.com)

Useful commands to run from a rescue shell to see what you have:

lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 vga
free -m
cat /proc/cpuinfo
dmesg | grep -i radeon

If this is a one‑off refurbish for web/email/office, pick Puppy or SliTaz and add a small swap file. If learning or wanting a fuller Debian/Slackware experience later, save for a RAM upgrade first — otherwise builds like Gentoo will be painfully slow on that CPU (as pointed out).

Recommended Answers

All 11 Replies

Member Avatar for jbennet

How fast is the AMD processor and what is its intel ewuivilent?
128 will just run SuSe but 300 odd - 512 is better
An old fedora like version 1 will run on 128mb ram as will a fairly compact distro like debian or slackware.

Member Avatar for Har31n6er

How fast is the AMD processor and what is its intel ewuivilent?
128 will just run SuSe but 300 odd - 512 is better
An old fedora like version 1 will run on 128mb ram as will a fairly compact distro like debian or slackware.

Think the AMD CPU is 900. In MHz, it's just that - 900MHz. Actually, I found a few distros that I'm going to try

Damn Small Linux

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

And Vector Linux (based on Slackware)

http://www.vectorlinux.com/

I'll post again and let everyone know how it went. Any other suggestions are welcome!

Member Avatar for jbennet

Yeah, the grahics card is an issue as open souce software cant invclude non opensource software with it by default like Nvidia or ATI's graphics drivers. Buy some more ram (i got 256 for £20 a while ago) and buy the full version of the suse (around £40) or get the free ones and use Yast (software update installler) to get the ATI driver

Member Avatar for analogdog

I have found that Debian is a very lightweight distro that I have settled on, even on much faster computers, as it runs so fast.


for testing Linux, try running the live version of Knoppix, and it will tell you what your machine can do.

Member Avatar for pty

I ran Fedora Core 4/Gnome for ages on my old machine (800Mhz Athlon w/ 512mb RAM)

A stick of 512MB RAM is very cheap ($44 according to Froogle!) and I'd imagine you could run pretty much any recent distro on your computer, both Gnome and KDE seem to be running faster and faster each release.

My choice of distro these days is Ubuntu, 1 cd for the basics (FC has 5) and then you can use synaptic to get the programs you actually want.

Member Avatar for jbennet

ubuntu or get debian etch (soon to be the stable version)

Member Avatar for John A

Gentoo Minimal is well, very minimal. It can be anything you want actually. You install the base system, and then you can add X desktop, other software, etc.

Be warned! First of all, you need a lot of Linux know-how. Secondly, you need an internet connection to the thing, at least while you're installing. And thirdly, almost everything is compiled from source, so if you've got a slow-ish processor, be prepared to let it compile for a few days on end.

The results are rewarding, though. It's optimized for your processor, so you have very little code bloat. You also get the flexibility, because you only install exactly what you need.

Member Avatar for TheNNS

I like dreamlinux, but it probably wouldn't run too well on machine like that. I like mandrake. Slax is also a good livecd.

Member Avatar for pfunix

Hi all, my first real post here. I bought this rig:

Gateway OEM PC

192 MB RAM (128MB PC130 SDRAM)(64MB PC130 SDRAM)
20gig HDD
ATI RADEON 32MB SDR
AMD Athlon 900 CPU
Creative Sound card CMI8738/C3DX PCI Audio Device
CD1 =NEC DV-5700A CD ROM
CD2 =LITEON CD-ROM LTN4865
PCI MODEM Enumerator
WinMe Promise Ultra100 IDE Controller
Generic NEC FDD
RealTek RTL8029(AS)-based PCI ethernet Adaptor

Second hand here in Japan. It didn't come with any paperwork, only a few OEM CDROMs, but that doesn't matter too much I guess. I tried SuSE 10 on there but it ran so slowly and randomly locked up. Unbuntu didn't even install due to a blank screen with two white pixels there (the video card probably wasn't supported).

My question (finally) is what Linux Distro would you recommend for this machine?

Cheers in advance

you can try out OpenBSD :) I know that it's something else other than linux but it's also free i run it on my Pentium 100Mhz, 128mb, 10GB and i use this as my Lan router/proxy as well as my test webserver/ftp :) pretty neat it does it all check it out www.openbsd.org

:)pfunix

Member Avatar for jbennet

i run debian testing on a mahine with specs like these just fine. if your videocard doesnt work with ubuntu:

Use alt-f2 to switch to a terminal
cd /
cd etc
cd X11 (CAPITALS!)
vi xorg.conf
push insert key

go down to the bit which says "section - video" and change driver to "vesa" (it should say ati or radeon before)

hit esc
do :w
do :q
do ctrl-alt-backspace

Member Avatar for Junyah

I had luck putting fedora core 1 on a recycled 128k celeron IBM back into use for school. I had to do this cuz there was no internet. Its working pretty good cuz then got an internet connection now ... the workstation is only used for internet and office stuff .. Mozilla and Open Office. Zero Budget/Old Computers

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