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Update!! Laptop OS - DSL, Puppy linux or NT4?

S

saabman

Member
This is an update to a previous post about what OS to run on a really old laptop, circa 1996.

Laptop is a Hitachi VisionBook, 150MHz Pentium, 128MB RAM, 6GB HDD, 3com 3c575 PCMCIA ethernet card, usb chipset (Hitachi eventually admitted it was non-working from the beginning). It shipped with a Win95 image reload CD.

Tried 98SE -- this was too slow (didn't try a 98lite version yet), but network worked.

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Tried WinNT4.0 SP6, but could not get the 3com PCMCIA ethernet adapter to work no matter what I tried. Had to use a special bootfloppy though, as NT4.0 won't boot on this laptop (even though the BIOS has a boot from CD option).

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Tried DSL linux, but had the same problem with the 3com PCMCIA ethernet adapter as I had with NT4. Liked the OS though, it was fast. Need to use the special syslinux image CD version, as the ISOlinux image CD version won't boot.

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Tried pupplinux 2.00, this works. Had to use a special bootfloppy though, because the ISOlinux image CD won't boot on this laptop (even though the BIOS has a boot from CD option).

1) I couldn't get a PCMCIA enet driver to load and work correctly (only 3com 574 and 589 PCMCIA drivers were listed). No 575 driver was listed.

2) When I ran the Network wizard and selected the eth0 button instead of the PCMCIA button I was able to select from the same list of drivers. I then selected the 3com 59x driver (instead of either of the PCMCIA drivers) and eveything works great.

Hopefully this helps others with the popular 3com 575 PCMCIA ethernet card on a laptop.
 
Give MepisLite a spin. Its Mepis with KDE, but apparently they tried to make it as light as possible. People reported it working fine on only 128 megs of ram. Maybe you should give it a shot. Here's a link to their testing directory if you're interested.

Two other distros I know of Zenwalk and Xubuntu (based off Ubuntu) both use the XFCE desktop environment so they might run much lighter than Gnome or KDE on your system.
 
Thanks sleep!

I've been trying all kinds, so why not a few more.

Seems those distros without KDE or Gnome definately work faster on my meager machine.
 
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