Windows OS Alternative

[mrreizor]

I have an old IBM Thinkpad laptop (P100, 96MB RAM) with a docking station. I currently have Win98 loaded on it, but I'd like to divulge into another arena. I'm in the IT field now, so I have a good background in the Windows/AS400 platforms, but none in Linux and others.

What would you guys recommend I load on this laptop? I need something that will work "decently" on such an old laptop. I'm mainly going to use it as a learning tool.

*to show you how far away I am from the current IT happenings, I went Googling for information on BeOS*

 

[drag]

You have enough RAM to run a GUI enviroment on Linux.. but the low cpu mhz means that it probably won't be much fun.

Probably for a desktop the most usability your going to get out of it will be from using a very low resource window manager like FVWM or Icewm. These provide basic functionality without the overhead of something like Gnome or KDE. (Gnome and KDE are full-featured desktop environments with requirements similar to Windows XP. These are the standard desktops used by most 'mainstream' linux distros)

But even then it probably won't be that usefull for that sort of thing.

Most of what you'd use it for would just be a command line enviroment. A unix shell like Bash.

For a Linux distribution it will probably be easier to use one that is specificly designed for older hardware.

A good example is Damn Small Linux. http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

It's a lightweight Linux distro that is designed to fit within a 50meg cdrom image for a 'live cd'. (a linux distro that runs directly from the Linux install without having to install anything). But it can be put on a USB flash drive or be installed onto your harddrive.

Probably should work out pretty well for you.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Yeah something very light and small like damnsmalllinux would work out well.

You might even be able to run Zenwalk (defaults an Xfce WM) or you coudl starting playing around with Debian and install Xfce or another light WM.

 

[mrreizor]

I think that fits the bill exactly! Thanks alot Drag!

Care to help me get my project off the ground?