Subj : Which Distro
To   : JOHN GUILLORY
From : ROB MCCART
Date : Sat May 14 2005 05:54 pm

JG>Hey gang,
  >  I'm going to be getting an internal cd-rom for my laptop tha thas only 8mb
  >ram around Tuesday....  I have been thinking of putting a version of linux
  >on it to play around with... (Though may sorta hold off due to the fact that
  >I may need Windows'95 for the infra red wireless printer that I ordered for
  >$19.99 as well...)  Not to mention, the thought of using windows and the
  >printer to generate invoices at customers houses when I do computer related
  >work is a thought.... I could allways write a program that does it via serial
  >port, and perhaps find drivers to treat the wireless as a serial port, which
  >basically what Windows'95 does....  If I went with Linux, I'd end up having t
  >write my own invoicing program, which would work for simple 1-2 item invoices
  >at first, but would be a pain for future invoices....  Any way, if I did go
  >with Linux to play around with.... What version of Linux would you recommend
  >(Either Slackware, Redhat, Mandrake) that would run smoothly in console mode
  >a Pentium 100mHz w/ 8mb RAM and allow me to install all programming
  >environments and perhaps Virtual Pascal for Linux....  I've ran Linux on a
  >80386 DX-40 with 4 or 8 mb RAM before and it flew in console mode, so don't t
  >to tell me I can't find a version that'll run decent....  The next question i
  >do you have a link to that version in case its not available via
  >www.linuxiso.org ...

I gotta say, 8 meg is so light that there's not much of anything that
will run on it. If Win 95 booted at all it would be a slug and spend
it's whole life swapping off of the hard drive. I still had an old 486
laptop with 8 meg last year and I ran Win 3.1 on it so I'd have Some
limited Windows program access (MS Works, etc.) but it was mainly a
DOS system really. There's still lots of old DOS software around.

As you suggested, a very basic console version of Linux might not
take much more than DOS would and should have more updated options
available to it but I think you'd still be rather limited in what
you could run. Maybe someone else can recommend a basic-basic Linux
version that would be the best to try as my experience is very limited.

I did recently read about a version called Tiny Linux that they were
raving about. That might be worth doing a search for online to see
what they have to say about it..

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