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.

  • Melon Husk™@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    21·
    5 hours ago

    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.

  • hoppolito@mander.xyzEnglish
    2·
    23 hours ago

    There was recently another user asking the same for a similar machine on the .ml Linux comm.

    As I did there, I can only tell you I successfully ran antix on a similarly old eee-pc from 2007ish, with the same CPU. It did have 1gb of ram though iirc, but the distro ran fairly comfortably (until it came to browsing with many tabs open).

    • faintwhenfree@lemmus.orgEnglish
      17·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • BoloMKXXVIII@piefed.socialEnglish
        6·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • faintwhenfree@lemmus.orgEnglish
          9·
          2 days ago

          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.

          • Blaster M@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 day ago

            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.

    • sem@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      I recommend Puppy for the cutest distro! As long as you don’t need/expect everything to work 100%

    • spittingimage@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      I’m gonna anti-recommend TinyCore unless you’re an advanced user. The wiki is a trap full of outdated info spread across several different versions of the OS.

  • somerandomperson@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    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!

  • Akatsuki Levi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    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

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    1 day 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·
      23 hours 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·
        15 hours 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·
          9 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.