ALinux AKA Peanut Linux, and DSL

So I was looking for a distro I could get on my old Pentium 100 with 24MB of RAM. One of the first distro's I tried, and liked was Peanut Linux (now called ALinux). It was fun pulling up a desktop on a newer kernel in such an old school computer. It seems to have changed somewhat from the minimalist distribution it was when I tried it out. I successfully booted it and had a KDE desktop on a rather old school pc.

DSL, no not Digital Subscriber Line, but "Damn Small Linux". This is neat this one fits on a 50MB business card cd, and is a real minimalist distribution. It was perfect for the old machine. Although it was fun booting up kde on that box, you really don't want to know how responsive it was. :-D It uses a desktop that's not anywhere near as resource intensive...Fluxbox a useable and fast desktop manager. This little distro that could is quite amazing considering the space on the disk it takes up is pretty laughable. It even has cdrtools so you can burn cds. Unfortunately it comes with an older version of firefox 0.91, but hey that can always be downloaded. It does have the older kernel base 2.4.26, but that's perfect for old school hardware.

All in all pretty neat stuff. I also successfully installed debian on the box, which my boy's were extatic about since they love the educational software that comes in with debian.

The next articles will be talking about my experience with the development environment in linux.