Debian User Forums

Hello!

My friend's Windows NT PC didn't want to boot anymore so I offered help for him. I burnt the Ubuntu Live CD and booted Ubuntu, but it was veery slow because the PC had only 192Mb RAM and an old Pentium 3 processor.. Then I tried Xubuntu's Live CD and hoped that it would be faster (because of XFCE instead of Gnome), but it was just a little faster than the Ubuntu's Live CD.. Finally, I tried KNOPPIX but it didn't want to start; it said something about an I/O Error on dm-block or something like that..

So I'm asking for a (Debian based) Linux Live CD distro which would be light (in the sense of the ISO size) and fast (which should operate fine with a PC with only 192Mb RAM and a Pentium 3 CPU)

Thanks in advance!
Btw, the PC doesn't have a floppy drive, so any Floppy-Linux won't do it.

FeatherLinux is by far the great mini Linux LiveCD distro available. I have it installed on my friend's computer (Since it wouldn't accept anything else, although I'm thinking of upping him to Fluxbuntu when it has a proper release).

If you can't find the FeatherLinux mirror (I searched for hours but it was worth it, better than DSL) you can try out Damn Small Linux. It's small but gets the job done.

thamarok wrote: So I'm asking for a (Debian based) Linux Live CD distro which would be light (in the sense of the ISO size) and fast (which should operate fine with a PC with only 192Mb RAM and a Pentium 3 CPU)

Thanks in advance!
Btw, the PC doesn't have a floppy drive, so any Floppy-Linux won't do it.

I tried the Damn Small Linux (DSL) last year and had a blast with it. It is a wonderfully small, light and extremely fast LiveCD (50MB). I highly recommend it!

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

*Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram
*Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!)

I like BeaFanatIX.

Here's my own review.

Debian of course....
http://live.debian.net/debian-cd/daily- ... 0202/i386/
or knoppix is one of my favs...

of course - puppy, feather, featherweight, DSL....

Thanks everybody for the suggestions!

DeanLinkous wrote:Debian of course....
http://live.debian.net/debian-cd/daily- ... 0202/i386/
or knoppix is one of my favs...

of course - puppy, feather, featherweight, DSL....

Debian offers a Live CD? I never knew that.. I must try it

I have used both BeaFanatIX and BeatrIX (it's older sister). They are what I cut my Linux teeth on...nice distros with great user friendly support.

-Hard drive install can be a little trick for newbies to linux....but if linux was on the drive before...it is easy.

-gives you all the main tools you need to run a basic system...and BeaFanatIX has it's own repositories.

-definitely a good choice for smaller systems, chaulked full of expansion possibilities!

DSL is very good.
My fav live cd is slax, but it is not debian-based.. never tried the debian live cd

DSL is nice, but my favorite small distro is Puppy simply because it only needs 64mb of ram to run.

'Haven't tried BeaFanatIX, but Beatrix didn't work well for me on an old slow laptop with 128 megabytes of ram. The only thing that worked well was the ncurses based installers for SuSE and Xubuntu "alternate install"; no the Xubuntu live distro didn't work with that old thing. DSL did work wonderfully. I don't think the Beatrix's are particularly lightweight. Puppylinux also worked on the old slowpoke; in fact, it worked wonderfully for getting online using a computer whose hard drive was dead. I like DSL for things like editing my Xorg.conf without booting the installed OS though. DSL is also just nifty. 'Cuter than puppy, actually; it's tiny and packed full of useful stuff.

P.S. I've since tried Debian Etch with Xfce desktop on another slow little laptop and it runs great!

Good luck. Try them all! I did.