Old and dusty Pentium III Dell computer brought back to life by Puppy Linux!

A Dell Optiplex GX150 850Mhz is lying on the corner and here's what it got:

Hardrive - none
Processor - Pentium III Coppermine 850Mhz
Memory -256 MB
Optical - present

It's not basically working so I did some cleaning and all kinds of curses to make it boot. After taking out the processor, blown some magic air on it and putting it back again, the machine booted-up!

No more such thing as microsoft windows dominance

Fast & furius 30mb OS

I've got an earlier post regarding this linux distro and I'm using it right now to watch youtube videos. I'm impressed on the way midori integrates with flash to render youtube videos seamlessly. I tried running slitaz on P4 CPU 3Ghz (screenshot below) and AMD Turion 64 X2 1.8Ghz processor and it performed extremely well on the P4 and blindingly fast on the 64bit CPU.

Slitaz is frugal on cpu and memory usage. Though I've noticed that it acted differently from browser to browser (screenshot below is showing task using midori). Yet, it's not a big deal, because firefox and midori renders webpages and flash videos with no problem at all.

     

 showing task using midori and firefox respectively                                          

Here's a short list of the other cool features of SliTaz:
Built-in LiveCD and LiveUSB creator - works perfectly 
Mountbox - gives full control on which drives you'd like to mount or unmount
tazpkg - easy to use apt-get like package manager with GUI
Gparted Partition Editor - easy to use partition manager

This little spidey is not as robust as PCLOS LXDE 2010 (my preferred distro) but at 30mb - it is really an impressive distro (please note that SliTaz also got LXDE as the default desktop environment). SliTaz has the ability to become a full featured desktop simply by adding packages using tazpkg with more than 2000+ apps in its repository.

SliTaz loads totally to RAM so if you have 1G or higher memory, it can be extremely fast. 

Right now, I'm hunting for older boxes to try this small wonder in, to see what it can do on machines with lower resources.

Important links:
http://www.slitaz.org/
http://www.slitaz.org/en/get/index.html#stable
http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/cooking/slitaz-cooking.iso

Related post:
http://noteither.blogspot.com/2010/03/boot-baby-boot.html