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[LUG] Slitaz, quite impressed.

 

Entertaining little project that soaked up a couple of hours tonight;

Work had a very old laptop donated, a Dell Inspiron 5100. No wifi, only LAN and Bluetooth. 512mb ram, twice as thick and heavy as modern laptops and a surprisingly spacious 40gb hdd and a reasonable battery. It did have a PCMCIA socket and I had a couple of old wifi cards.

One new resident needed a machine so they could watch our welfare CCTV (Horses in stables) in the evening. I figured this might do it.

It came with Windows XP installed, along with a *lot* of cruft, including a crippling install of Macafee and other nasties, as well as a lot of personal information (several years of accounts, teenage kids' chatlogs, holiday pics, etc etc - some folk just don't care what details about themselves they pass on!).

So, anyway. I wanted to put something other than windows on there to make the most of the hardware, so it was to be a flavour of linux. I've used Ubuntu, xubuntu, debian and others, but specifically wanted a lightweight distro.

A quick search introduced me to Slitaz. No, I hadn't heard of it either. The guide I read suggested the install was all in French, but that it was still worth trying.

The livecd was all of 53MB (One tenth of Ubuntu's!). It ran and detected everything, even the pcmcia modem. I was genuinely gobstruck how much was included in this palty amount: Web browser, multimedia stuff, some stabs at office tools, (ok, using online apps...), even a couple of games. A nice looking desktop. The only thing I needed to install was Firefox (for mjpeg streaming, the included browser didn't support that), but this was managed effortlessly using the built in package manager (version 10, a few behind current). Wifi configuration was a breeze too!

Autologin, autostart, good forum support, definitely worth looking at if you need a very lightweight distro.

Oh, and it's very very fast. Okay, when Firefox is streaming 8 or so CCTVfeeds, the CPU is maxed out and the fan gets a little noisy, but I was expecting that and with so little OS overhead it does get the most it can out of such old hardware.

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