arshadmomen Posted April 17, 2006 Report Share Posted April 17, 2006 Hi, Recently my educational institute received a donation of 20+ old computers ( with pentium 166 , 64MB ram and 1.5 GB HD). We expect our students to learn some C programming, to be able to use emacs and/or vi , run latex , plot graphs etc. Can anyone suggest which would be a good distro to try on these machines? I thought of using LTSP but that's not an option at the moment. Thanks in advance, A. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted April 17, 2006 Report Share Posted April 17, 2006 Vector Linux, Damn Small, Puppy Linux, plain Slackware... all of them should be very good on it. And any source based distro, like Gentoo, should be fine with proper flags, but quite fussy to install and maintain. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted April 17, 2006 Report Share Posted April 17, 2006 Slackware or Debian would be my suggestions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arshadmomen Posted April 18, 2006 Author Report Share Posted April 18, 2006 Thanks Arctic and Scarecrow, I think I will go with Slack. Any particular version? Thanks for the tips. A. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted April 18, 2006 Report Share Posted April 18, 2006 10.2 is very stable and easy to install. 11.0 is only available from the slackstore right now, so you could wait for the free download of 11.0 (should be available in a few weeks) or go with 10.2 which can be upgraded to 11.0, if you really think you need the latest Slack. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted April 18, 2006 Report Share Posted April 18, 2006 1st choice: Damn Small Linux, 2nd choice: Debian. Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted April 18, 2006 Report Share Posted April 18, 2006 I haven't used slack since version 2 but I'd definately think Debian stable is a good option. Source based distro's are fun but you tend to get distracted (that's all part of the fun!) and slackware is still using kernel 2.4 (I think) which is OK but you miss fully-loadable modules like in 2.6... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted April 18, 2006 Report Share Posted April 18, 2006 Slackware has the 2.6 kernel as an alternative available on the CDs. It is true, Debian will probably be easier to set up and maintain. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted April 18, 2006 Report Share Posted April 18, 2006 Vector is Slackware with a simplified installer, 2.6.X kernel, and xfce or IceWM as default window manager... give it a try, it does have some bugs, but it's genuinely good stuff. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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