What live-cd works on 64 MB RAM?

[Garibaldi]

Hello Everyone,
A friend of mine has an old pc with 64 MB of RAM on it and windows no longer works. I recommend he try the Slax live-cd with fluxbox but he said it worked but it was very very sluggish. Does anyone know of any graphical live-cds that will run on only 64 MB at a faster speed?

[EddyH]

dya think it might be an idea to scrounge up a free or cheap memory upgrade from somewhere, anywhere first? sticking an extra 128 into it to make 192 should cost about as much as an extra value meal these days!

i.e. i dont know but seeing as you'll be running everything from the cd straight into memory, possibly with no swapfile, it'd be tight....

incidentally perhaps its not the memory thats the problem. his processor speed could be anything from a p100 thru to a celeron 700mhz with that amount of RAM. might be that the CPU isnt quick enough to cope with it.

[Garibaldi]

dya think it might be an idea to scrounge up a free or cheap memory upgrade from somewhere, anywhere first? sticking an extra 128 into it to make 192 should cost about as much as an extra value meal these days!

i.e. i dont know but seeing as you'll be running everything from the cd straight into memory, possibly with no swapfile, it'd be tight....

incidentally perhaps its not the memory thats the problem. his processor speed could be anything from a p100 thru to a celeron 700mhz with that amount of RAM. might be that the CPU isnt quick enough to cope with it.

That could be. How do you do a hard drive install of slax? Are there just like boot prompts like in Knoppix:
copy2hd
install /dev/hda1...

[sybariten]

dya think it might be an idea to scrounge up a free or cheap memory upgrade from somewhere, anywhere first? sticking an extra 128 into it to make 192 should cost about as much as an extra value meal these days!

i.e. i dont know but seeing as you'll be running everything from the cd straight into memory, possibly with no swapfile, it'd be tight....

incidentally perhaps its not the memory thats the problem. his processor speed could be anything from a p100 thru to a celeron 700mhz with that amount of RAM. might be that the CPU isnt quick enough to cope with it.

Sure, both Damn Small Linux and Feather Linux should run OK on 64 Mb. I cant promise you he'll be able to load the system into RAM though. But try those distros ... they are built on the same base and look very similar .... i tend to go for feather as it has somewhat more tools.

peace

[Garibaldi]

Thanks for the info! I know DSL is supposed to be a great distro for old computers, I'll give that a try.

What distro are you running?

[Bjs]

Use puppy , its a live distro , kept at 50mbs , put on mini cd , shove in pocket .

For 64mbs ram , the user will need to type a command ???? 64 , which tells it the pc has only 64mbs of memmory .

The great thing , its easy to setup net .

You can add other packages if you need them to the distro , to personalize it a bit .

Burn the iso using nero on a wins pc , but dont close the cd .

This can then be used as a rescue cd as well :

Boot non working wins pc with it (providing its an os problem only)
Setup net connection
Download updates , and drivers to temp folder

Puppy has inbuilt cd burning feature , when about too burn , it will spit puppy cd out , if this cd was not closed when originally created , just reinsert it , and burn the files to it , which will close the cd .

Print any info that may help .

For non booting xp systems , there is a file that requires backup , cant recall what it is , but if its not backed up , when xp is reinstalled , it will need to be re-registered with ms (phone call) .

Do a google search on xp , wpa backup ... should reveal the file that needs to backed up .

The most valuable , as its bootable , you can also backup windows favs , downloads not yet backed up , work files , wab (outlook express file containing contacts) , and others , so if pc needs reinstall to fix problems , you can minimize the loss of valuable data ...

[Garibaldi]

What WM does it use?

[sybariten]

Thanks for the info! I know DSL is supposed to be a great distro for old computers, I'll give that a try.

What distro are you running?

Heres an answer to the question you asked there, in a galaxy far far away:
I have Knoppix on this dualboot laptop i'm tryping from now. Its my workstation. Knoppix is like a derivative of debian, very easy to install. I hardly boot it though.
I do however run Ubuntu on an iMac that serves as a P2P-server.
Personally, the only thing i'm after in *nix is the bash shell. So i prefer headless machines. Linux on the desktop doesnt do much for me, its just not worth it, not when i can run XP which is much quicker and has more interesting tools.
But, as i said, i really love the shell. If Windows would come with a shell like bash, i'd never run anything but Win. Sad as it may be.

Who's on your avatar?

[Garibaldi]

My avatar is Jerry Doyle, the actor who played the character of Michael Garibaldi on the TV Show Babylon 5.