[ILUG] Damn Small Linux

[Bryan O'Donoghue]

Lars Hecking wrote:
>  I am looking for a small Linux distro to run X and the latest firefox
>  on a 64MB PII-350. Nothing else.
> 
>  DSL looks really good, but comes with an older firefox. I tried to swap in
>  latest Linux release from mozilla.org, but it won't work as it requires a
>  whole lot of additional libs, such as gtk+2, which are not included with
>  DSL.
> 
>  I tried to install gtk+2 via apt-get (which I am utterly unfamiliar with
>  and ignorant of ...), and after following a number of dependencies which
>  did not get installed, I managed to install one package. However, at the
>  same, it removed a whole load of other packages, such as ssh ...
> 
>  The machine doesn't have the resources to compile all necessary packages
>  and firefox. For the same reason, gentoo is out.
> 
>  Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get the latest firefox onto DSL
>  (1.0rc2), or suggest another small distro that stands a chance of working
>  with my given constraints?



/Oh, look at this tasty can of worms Lars has opened

If you need firefox with gtk2, then you need a glibc based distro, which
comes bundled with these libs.

My own experience with running Thunderbird and firefox is that they are
between them amazingly resource hungry, eating 20mb+ of ram at times.

To this end I run fluxbox a browser, thunderbird and a couple of
aterms... and still with 128mb of ram, if I don't watch what I'm doing,
it'll start paging to swap... which stinks.

Anyway, I had a *mad* notion to try out nanoX/microwindows, which
apparently you can get a version of mozilla running under, not a new
version, but... the paging to swap problem gets very bad sometimes.

http://www.microwindows.org/SSNanoXOther.html

<yes my swap problem gets that bad>

But, I'd be fairly confident, that running Fedora + fluxbox +
firefox<=('n' concurrent tabs), would be safe enough. Perhaps if you
want a modern desktop, bite the bullet and buy some more ram !

Alternatively, you might want to try out something like debian running
from uClibc

...

/searches

should be here http://www.debian.org/~andersee/ but, perhaps has gone
the way of the ehter.

If you can live without the latest shiny Firefox release... you can
probably find some really low ram alternatives.

Possibly you could use the Codepoet buildroot system, to ... ahem,
compile from source ?

http://www.uclibc.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/trunk/buildroot/