So, I yanked out my dad's way old 133Mhz (oc'ed to 233Mhz) pentium 1 motherboard and started playing with it. It wouldn't load windows (even 98), so I popped a dsl 2 livecd in, and voila, life! Seriously though, I am so amazed that the damn thing actually runs with 32Mb of RAM. Also, I installed to a 116 MEGABYTE harddrive that I yanked from an old X11 system...so now I've got roughly 70Mb of free space. Just think, I could put one whole cd (in mp3/ogg format) on the hard drive. Anyways, just wanted to know what the slowest processor speed that dsl has successfully installed on...I would have to guess that since DSL version 0.6 and newer now require a CPU that has a builtin floating point processor (486DX or higher) the minimum usable machine would be a
486DX 25Mhz CPU with 16MB of RAM
For DSL version 0.5.3.1 or older, you could even run DSL on a 486SX machine, as documented here:
Anyways, just wanted to know what the slowest processor speed that dsl has successfully installed on...
Im running dsl on an old toshiba laptop with a p75 (pentium 75) mhz processor, and 24mb ram, it runs fine, only firefox is a pain because its a memory and resource hog, so instead i use dillo for everything (nice and fast) and what i cant do with dillo i can usually do with opera, Opera runs a bit slow too but way better than firefox did and Opera lets me access sites with stricter browser requirements when needed.
I'd say i surf 95% dillo, 5% opera <-- when needed for stricter sites.
But hey it works for me and now this old laptop isnt just sitting in storage gathering dust anymore, im actually getting alot of work done with it.
original here.