Hi!
Someone asked me to revive their 20 year old laptop as its no longer working on their installation of windows XP.
This baby has around 512MB of Ram, 1.6 GHZ Intel Atom.
This is my first time doing something with hardware older than myself so I'd love some insight from people around.
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TinyCore (loads itself into RAM), Puppy, Proteus and Zolin Lite will all be happy with 512 MiB.
Edit: also antiX, QOS, Slax and DSL.
Archbang, Slitaz, Sparky and MX may not support
x86, double-check.Also gentoo has a full binary-only version now.
Edit2:
Interesting that Zorin says their regular flavors are now efficient enough that they'll run just fine on older hardware, so there's no need to continue Zorin Lite:
Emphasis mine. Wow, only 2 GiB...
That's not as low as you'd think, to be fair. I've tried to run Kubuntu on a 10 year old laptop with 2 GiB RAM and it worked, if only a little laggy. That being said, it crashes after half an hour without swap. But with swap, it is legitimately daily drivable (as long as you don't run heavy apps, of course).
I'd imagine a distro that's designed to be even more lightweight would be able to handle that.