[Rule] Care to discuss favorite lightweight apps?

[rkwesk at hellug.gr]

Hello All

I still have several old computers. One is my personal laptop, a Sony  
Vaio PCG-505FX. It is a pentium 1 mmx that has 64 MB of ram (I never  
added the additional 32 MB which it is designed to take.)

I hadn't ever had the cdrom drive for it either. However, I have made  
full use of its pcmcia slot (32 bit) because I have an ethernet card,  
a usb2 card and an external box in which I can put any internal dvd or  
ide hard drive I wish which is connected by a pcmcia card. The laptop  
has only one slot so these are available one at a time. I also have  
the floppy drive for it.

I use Debian testing on it and keep up to date with all updates,  
security and otherwise. I have made use of a splendid bootloader that  
fits on a floppy that can locate an iso image that resides on a root  
directory of any hard disk partition or on a cd or dvd drive and will  
boot the iso even though the bios doesn't support such luxuries! Info  
on it is at  http://gujin.sourceforge.net/

I have been able to run the Debian installer in 64 MB this way. Before  
discovering this I had a floppy with Tom's rootboot distro on it,  
http://www.toms.net/rb/ which, when booted, could recognise my  
ethernet pcmcia card and I was able to start from scratch with fdisk  
to arrange the hard drive as I wanted and could copy over a freshly  
installed, but minimal system of any kind I wanted from another pc on  
my network. Then I used another floppy with the grub loader and was  
able to make the adjustments needed to use this as a starting point.

For the graphical environment I find the vesa driver the best choice  
and have successfully used several light window managers. Lately, I  
have installed Ubuntu (using the mini iso) and installed fluxbox.  
Adding iDesk gives the possibility of adding icons to the desktop (I  
have only one just to show people it is possible) and adding fbpanel  
provides a start menu, launch bar, task bar and system tray.

I even used the stock generic kernel of Ubuntu and the setup remains  
useable though it is slower than other configurations.

I have other pentium 1 machines belonging to our users group in case  
anyone wants testing and/or feedback.

Richard