Linux on 32 MB

[V|P]

Okay, my friend has a crap lappy (32 MB ram) and he asked me to look for an operating system for it. It needs to be free, I'm thinking it will be a Linux distro, and it needs to boot from HDD not CD or Flash Drive or anything. It would also be good if it didnt rely heavily on command line.

EDIT: Don't need details, just list them and gimmie some quick points on it.

[drasnor]

You won't find a distro that small that doesn't make extensive use of the command line. Your best bet is going to be a network install of Debian which has to be done from the command line. Just install the base system and get it working, then try to install your X server and a window manager later. Try Xfce for your desktop environment. Make sure your hard drive swap is huge when you partition (256MB - 512MB).

-drasnor :fold:

[GrayFox]

DSL linux (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/) runs X with 16Megs of ram more.

[Jonsey]

There has to be something like TinyLinux still around... it fit in a 7MB HDD partition, though it didn't really have... you know, a windowing environment.

See if you can get the lappy boosted to 64 or 128 meg, then run a light install of a fat distro on it.

If not, there are a good number of truely tiny Linux kernels, but even the really light windowing environments will either be hideous or will hate 32mb of ram.

[drasnor]

Once you get DSL onto a hard drive it's Debian by their own admission but if you like DSL's install process more than Debian's then I can see going that route. Also, there are plenty of windowing environments that run passably on that hardware. I used to have a P1 box with 32 of RAM that ran KDE with all bloat. It was slow to launch software but it could do it. There shouldn't be any trouble with Xfce.

-drasnor :fold:

[Timsey]

I'm a second on DSL recommendation, there is also Puppy Linux which is along the same lines
www dot puppylinux dot org
I can't make it a link yet :)