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.

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Lots of good options already given, to throw a couple more one the pile Slackware if you want to play around with Linux more for a hobbyist than a user, Tails for a small Debian based security focused distro, or FreeBSD for something completely different but familiar, I’ve installed that on some pretty tiny hardware and it ran fine including an x86/atom CPU.

    • hoppolito@mander.xyzEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      I don’t know for the other but tails doesn’t exist as a 32bit version, does it? I’m also not sure it would very comfortable on 512mb ram.

      • whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        Yep that’s my bad, looks like that’s some old info I should have checked on. Tails dropped 32 bit x86 support in 2017 & wants more memory. A month ago freeBSD released a beta for 15.0 dropping support which is a bigger bummer for me since I like that OS for old hardware. Slackware still supports 32 and 64 bit architectures.

        • hoppolito@mander.xyzEnglish
          2·
          20 hours ago

          Are the BSDs generally good/workable on older hardware, especially laptops? I don’t really have a clue (no knowledge beyond Linux) but if so it sounds like a nice use for an old laptop, as a learning tool.