Porteus

Someone asked me to try to install something on an old machine.
It is a low-resource machine, I didn't see how much disk is but he told me there is one gb of ram so very little.
I saw that porteus also comes in i486 and i586 versions which wikipedia revealed to me are both 32bit.
Could they work? which one should I choose? to save resources what strategy should I adopt?

our current(5.01) is i586 which might work, (to some degree)
otherwise the i486 folder's most recent is 2014's 3.1 which will most likely still work..
just very out of date software and no chance of a modern webbrowser which probly wouldn't do well with one gig of ram anyway
a case of try it and see..

Okay, I tried the openbox version to save ram (540 mb at startup).
In the end it is very fast, it always takes those 40-50 seconds to start up but there is a problem, you can't log in as user.
I tried a little bit everything, I tried nologin cheatcode, I tried removing the guest user and putting it back, I tried creating another user. No luck, you can only log in as root.
Now I'm going to try to run the lxqt version which should always be lightweight since it uses openbox too.

Lxqt version works like a charm!
same amount of memory occupied, no login problem.
the computer is a sempron 2100+ around 2007, it is 17 years old!
1 gb ram, 1 gb hd, 1000mhz single core.
Everything works, wifi, audio, and even netsurf.
I hope you will continue to support this architecture because it is amazing!

Good to hear. Thanks for the update vinnie.

vinnie wrote: ↑

22 Jun 2024, 18:04

it is 17 years old!

My old one is older.

Ed_P wrote: ↑

22 Jun 2024, 19:21

My old one is older.

What kind of ancient beast you have?
Is there any way to make porteus even lighter?

Ed_P wrote: ↑

22 Jun 2024, 19:21

vinnie wrote: ↑
22 Jun 2024, 20:04
it is 17 years old!

My old one is older.

I have a working computer from the trash in the closet, it have Pentium 3 550MHz, 160 MB RAM, 10.2 GB HDD; it is probably 23 or 24-year-old.

i3slkiller wrote: ↑

22 Jun 2024, 20:29

it is probably 23 or 24-year-old.

Mine is about the same age. An AMD_XP_2000 but it has 2 GB of RAM and a 300 GB hdd.

Ed_P wrote: ↑

23 Jun 2024, 06:22

Mine is about the same age. An AMD_XP_2000 but it has 2 GB of RAM and a 300 GB hdd.

okay, older than mine but better of mine

i3slkiller wrote: ↑

22 Jun 2024, 20:29

I have a working computer from the trash in the closet, it have Pentium 3 550MHz, 160 MB RAM, 10.2 GB HDD; it is probably 23 or 24-year-old.

but this cannot work with porteus! What operating system did you put there?

vinnie wrote: ↑

23 Jun 2024, 07:20

but this cannot work with porteus! What operating system did you put there?

Windows 98 SE, I also made disk images with installed NT, ME, 2000 and XP. About Porteus, some time ago I tried boot 5.01 with kernel 6.6.20(?) and Xfce, but when tried to start desktop environment, the PC frozen (maybe if I activate swap, then probably would load the GUI, but I suspect that it will be terribly slow).