I know it isn't a district but there is something you should try using on that machine if you only have 256MB of RAM, ZRAM aka compcache ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram ).
Find whatever light distribution and try that on it, it should help with the low memory situation. Many android devices make use of it and I also used to use it on my old work laptop which frequently ended up in swap with the workload I was using it for, after setting up compcache (it was before the rename) my laptop worked much better. The only worry is the compression may be a bit heavy for the old CPU but I think it would be preferable to heavy disk swapping. On Fri, 3 Jul 2015 08:30 Barry Drake <ubuntu-advertis...@gmx.com> wrote: > On 25/06/15 11:12, Barry Drake wrote: > > > That's interesting! My old pentium 4 has only 256 Mb ram. I'm going to > > try some old dimm cards to see if any are compatible > > Hi there ... I've had a very interesting time since then. I didn't > have a pair of suitable dimm cards, so I've stuck with the 256 MB. I've > now tried a whole lot of distros. The very best results are with DSL - > and there's now a DSL-N - which does quite a lot more. And also Puppy. > That's probably the best way to demonstrate what is possible on such > limited hardware. > > BUT. When I first installed DSL to a heard drive, it worked perfectly > and booted just fine from the hard drive. It just happened that I put > it on an old IDE drive that had Ubuntu 8.04 on it. After that, I tried > to work with another IDE drive that had been re-partitioned recently > using gparted. Grub could not be installed by the DSL (or Puppy) > installer. It threw the error that there was no corresponding BIOS > drive. This has to do with a change in the way the MBR works now, > compared with back then. > > I installed 8.04 on a drive using the old hardware. Surprisingly, 8.04 > runs on the old hardware better than I had expected! After that, I > installed DSL-N onto the same drive with perfect results. Now, how to > change the MBR on other drives without having to install 8.04 .... I > think I can save the first 446 bytes of the MBR to a file using dd - I > understand that this copies only the boot information, and not the > partition table, so it is portable to another disk. Having said that, I > can't find anywhere exactly what has changed in the way in which BIOS > boot took place then compared with now. I've just about exhausted my > efforts to find out on the internet ... anybody know any more? I'm > really curious. > > But: my answer as to the best system for seriously old computers is > definitely DSL-N and/or Puppy. Both seem a bit quirky at first, but > they can both be made to do almost anything commonly needed. > > Regards, Barry. > -- > http://barrydrake.co.nr/ > > -- > ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/ >
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