On Mon, 7 Feb 2022, 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.
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.
I successfully run Debian on a 701 eeepc although I'm still on buster
for now using xfce. It's slow but not unusable, even firefox. updates do
take a while, allow at least 4-6 hours per dist-upgrade.
I mostly now use a kindle fire for 'walkabout' vpn and ssh access but
every now and again when something wifi won't work I return to the eeepc
for its better logging and debugging tools.
