Suitable linux dustro for Hp Compaq presario laptop with pentium m

[Shre96iyer]

Hey guys hope your doing well. 

I have this really old HP Compaq presario laptop with pentium m and 256 mb ram which was running windows xp, wanted to try any light linux distros that is suitable, as the xp is ancient, i tried lubuntu, puppy linux, alpine (tried mx linux, mint and others which just popped in a kernel panic error) and even tried an old version of Ubuntu to run on this machine, it seems to run just fine untill i open up any application especially the browser any one (light version or the normal one) fr tht matter it just would not run, the cpu usage would show 100% but ram usage was somewhere around 50-60%. I am not sure what else to try from here on out except for throwing it to the scrap, just wanted to make it wrk so that my younger sister could use for web browsing any help would be massively appreciated.

 

Thanks and regards,

[Radium_Angel]

5 minutes ago, Shre96iyer said:

web browsing

Not gonna happen unless it's a text only website.

The system is too old to support even basic functionality of modern web sites, without pegging the browser at 100%.

I have a similar laptop with a Pentium M CPU, and even though I put in 1GB of RAM (a huge amount back in that time frame) it just couldn't keep up.

 

 All the same, if you still wanna give it a try, use 

https://antixlinux.com/

 

Lightest distro I know of that is still fully GUI

[svmlegacy]

19 minutes ago, Shre96iyer said:

Hey guys hope your doing well. 

I have this really old HP Compaq presario laptop with pentium m and 256 mb ram which was running windows xp, wanted to try any light linux distros that is suitable, as the xp is ancient, i tried lubuntu, puppy linux, alpine (tried mx linux, mint and others which just popped in a kernel panic error) and even tried an old version of Ubuntu to run on this machine, it seems to run just fine untill i open up any application especially the browser any one (light version or the normal one) fr tht matter it just would not run, the cpu usage would show 100% but ram usage was somewhere around 50-60%. I am not sure what else to try from here on out except for throwing it to the scrap, just wanted to make it wrk so that my younger sister could use for web browsing any help would be massively appreciated.

 

Thanks and regards,

Gentoo (non-genkernel) is going to be the route to go here. My Core Duo laptop runs it, one of the few distro's that will tolerate less than 512 MB of RAM (This is what causes your kernel panics). No matter what, physically, your laptop will struggle with modern browsing. Web video playback is completely off the table, except for really low resolution stuff (even 240p Youtube will be a stretch). I recommend i3wm desktop environment, as it's super lightweight.

 

That being said - It's not going to perform much better than puppy linux, but at least, you'll have everything else trimmed, letting it be as fast as it possibly can.

[Nayr438]

The only thing it would really be able to run decently would be probably a distro using something like i3wm. If you want to know what that looks like, https://i3wm.org/screenshots/

For browsing, something like lynx or elinks, basically text browsers that run in the terminal.

 

If it was me, I would just dump it. A Core2Duo with 2GB of ram is about as slow and old as you can go and still have a GUI based system that's usable outside of remoting into something for maintenance, in which case I would still recommend something else.

[sp331yi]

Go to antixlinux.com and look around, maybe register, introduce self, and ask that question.  Look up

PAE vs non-PAE

with regards to Linux.  It's possible

CPUs that support/don't support PAE