On 2/7/2022 4:36 PM, Greg Wooledge wrote:
On Mon, Feb 07, 2022 at 04:31:51PM -0500, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote:
On 2/7/2022 10:50 AM, William Lee Valentine wrote:
I am wondering whether a current Debian distribution can be installed
and run on an older Pentium III computer. (I have Debian 11.2 on a DVD.)
The computer is
Dell Dimension XPS T500: Intel Pentium III processor (Katnai)
memory: 756 megabytes, running at 500 megahertz
IDE disc drive: 60 gigabytes
Debian partition: currently 42 gigabytes
Debian 6.0: Squeeze
Based on what others are saying, it looks like a typical modern Debian
desktop environment such as Gnome or Plasma KDE will not work well with such
an old system. I suggest you look for a Distro that is tailored for old
hardware.
Bah, silly. Just use a traditional window manager instead of a bloated
Desktop Environment. Problem solved.
Which windows manager for an extremely resource-limited system? Debian's
wiki page on window managers lists more than 30 possibilities. Its not
silly to take a look at a distro based on Debian that is tailored for
low resources as a starting point to try and build a Debian 11.2 system
that will work OK on a Pentium III with less than 1 GB of memory. Debian
provides so many packages, and such distros like antiX can give one an
idea about which packages to use when trying to build a Debian 11.2
system that will work well on an older system with such a small amount
of memory and such an old CPU.
But the *real* problem will come when they try to run a web browser. That's
where the truly massive memory demand is.
756 MB is plenty of RAM for daily use of everything except a web browser.
Yes, it will be important to try to find a web browser that is the least
bloated as possible. Again, looking at the browser choices of distros
tailored for old hardware can help build a Debian 11.2 system that will
work well on old hardware.
In any case, it will need to be a carefully crafted selection of Debian
11.2 packages to have a decent experience, and most definitely start
with a small netinst installation with only the text console to start,
and then build the GUI environment carefully from the ground up.
Again, good luck to the OP in trying out Debian 11.2 on his system.
Chuck
