Lightweight version of Linux?

I recently came into possession of a 166/Pentium w/32MB RAM and ~1gig HD and I wanted to install Linux onto it. What versions of Linux are there that will run on such a crappy system?

Depends on what you’re looking for. Any purely command line linux will run on that thing. Actually, pretty much any flavor of linux will work. I’d recommend Debian or Mandrake, Debian 'cause it’s cool, and Mandrake 'cause it’s easy. But most distributions aren’t very bloated, although I wonder about Red Hat sometimes.

SuSE has an option to install without the fancy-schmancy K Desktop Environment. You’ll probably be wanting some kind of windowing environment, so you can just install XFree86 yourself (it’ll be on the CDs) and then some nice lightweight window manager (blackbox should be on the cd, there’s also ratpoison, which is even more peeled down than blackbox).

You can do a surprising amount of stuff on such an old box.

I’d probably install slackware just because it gives you a bit more control over what goes on the box than a lot of the other distributions. Of course it’s also a bit more of a pain in the backside to install than a lot of the other distributions too. With a bit of care, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to fit linux with a KDE or gnome desktop onto a 1 gig disk. Just don’t go hog wild installing extras.

The smallest versions of linux I’m familiar with fit on a floppy, but then they don’t give you much in the way of features. A 1 gig disk is huge by comparison. :smiley:

www.linux.org has a list of compact versions of linux and their features.

Your ram is a little low, but as everyone else says, a pared down system can run on almost anything. My router/fileserver/webserver/etc. box right now is a P200 with 64M of ram. It’s a headless Debian box and works fine for my needs.

Almost any distribution, if you ditch the window manager, will work okay. I second the linux.org link.

Gentoo Linux can be just about as lightweight as you wish. Although, it’s not really for a beginner.

There are also quite a few “mini-distros” that fit on a diskette, and also a few distros that run from CD if you just want to test, such as Knoppix.

I’m going to have to second the opinion that what you are going to do really does matter. I had Slackware 3.6 installed on a 486-100MHz with no problems. Since I was using it as a web server, I didn’t need the windowing environment. That puppy ran smooth as a dream with only 12MB of RAM and (if I remember correctly) a 512MB harddrive.

So yeah, put me down as voting for Slackware. The configuration files in Slackware are also a lot easier to figure out (versus Red Hat, at least) (oh, and this was a few years ago, too).