Hi!
Someone asked me to revive their 20 year old laptop as its no longer working on their installation of windows XP.
This baby has around 512MB of Ram, 1.6 GHZ Intel Atom.
This is my first time doing something with hardware older than myself so I’d love some insight from people around.
Puppy Linux might be an option if that project is still going.
512MB of ram? you could probably just run a command line terminal and call it a day. good luck, soldier. bringing that old warhorse back to life is a noble quest.
That’s going to run like garbage with any desktop environment.
You need a lightweight window manager.
Check if that’s an 64-bit capable CPU, otherwise that will get tricky.
Seems to be an Intel Atom N270 x86
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Toshiba-NB100.12668.0.htmlI suppose I’m sticking to x32 builds no?
Sounds like it, yeah.
https://itsfoss.com/32-bit-linux-distributions/Debian appears to still support x86, and 512 MB memory.
If you can increase the memory, you can consider LMDE, but I suggest sticking to Debian with the extra memory to allow space for a browser and office applications.
EDIT: It appears 2 GB is possible, it was a limit in XP.
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/my-toshiba-nb100-netbook-review.17943780/
Edit2: https://a.co/d/5Mdq5Q8 is pretty cheap. You only need one, but it’s the same cost either way. Maybe you can sell or trade it?
Just use something where you compile everything from sources in a way that just works, such as NetBSD. Not technically a distro, but whatever, should do the job just fine :)
Debian GNU/Hurd 🤤
Tiny Core
This is the answer. Tiny Core is absolute best for old hardware as it gets running upto speed quickly takes very little resources and you can see what kind of resources it consumes and can add things to it to make it useful.
Doesn’t Tiny Core load into RAM? With 512 MB that could be a problem. There are many versions of Puppy Linux. I think they load into RAM also. I would try MX Linux and see if that worked. Expanding the amount of RAM would be helpful, but it is not worth spending money on that machine. I bought a functioning Fujitsu laptop with a 6th gen Core i5 Processor and 8 GB RAM for $80 on Ebay. Computers with a 7th gen Intel Core Processor or older won’t officially run Windows 11 so they are selling for cheap these days, if you shop around.
Tiny Core can loadit self into RAM, but it doesn’t have to, you can do a normal install as well. Also even if you want to run it from RAM, it only takes 46MB in RAM not ideal but manageable with 512MB. Also you can even downgrade if you are not UI dependent, you can install the core (non-tiny version) and only needs 26MB RAM.
Also consider Windows XP requires 200 MB of RAM to function, before we run any apps at all, so Tiny taking 46 MB to run leaves a huge headroom.
Justin Bieber OS. Biebian > Debian
One thing you could try is Alpine Linux It is surprisingly lightweight, and pair it with something like OpenBox or maybe XFCE, and it might be quite good
Just installed MiniOS on my 15 year old Dell Ultrabook. Small, fast and light.
512MB of Ram
Arch does technically „„run”” on it™
Otherwise regarding the CPU, I would set up a gentoo with distcc on it, since you dont be daily driving the thing anyways
FreeBSD
MX Linux.
It can run in in pretty much all hardware, and it’s debian-based too! It has Libreoffice, Firefox, etc. by default.Heck; if you can’t install it, you can just use is persistently from the USB!
Void Linux?
Everyone loves Ubuntu 24.04!
