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| Brandon | Damn Small LinuxOne of my favorite things to do is to get out a unique computer and try to load software on it. Usually that means trying to get Linux running. Most machines with 128MB of RAM and a decent graphics card will run the latest version of Crunchbang just fine, which is pretty unexciting. For machines with less RAM, or with older unsupported graphics, DSL has became the goto distro. It's older 2.4 kernel and older X server as well as light weight programs work on just about any machine. On a newer machine the problem is that the older kernel doesn't have all the wireless drivers that where added in the 2.6.x series of kernels and therefore DSL is pretty limited in it's ability to use wireless. Of course the older X server could also be a problem if you wanted to use accelerated graphics. I wish that Linux had made it's improvements to wireless and new graphics without cutting out support for the old. Admittedly, any machine made in the last 15 years that I've tried Linux on, works fine. But go back 20 years, to a time when hardware was really much more interesting, when you had AMD, Cyrix, and Intel all competing, and when laptops where still available with black and white grey-scale sunlight readable LCDs, and modern Linux chokes. I always say that I want to make a Linux distribution. If I ever do, I'll base my model off Puppy and DSL more than Debian. Sure Debian is great on a new machine, and it has the newest packages, but sometimes the older package is better. | 2014-05-14 | 3:50 PM |
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