Post #3898341 · Elektrine

2026-05-16 16:51 UTC

Good morning good People of Mastodon. I have an old dell Inspiron (OLD... Bought in 1998). Not sure what the specs are but we can assume low memory... The batteries won't charge anymore (neither main nor bios). I am sure I can get Debian working on it .. but was looking for suggestions on a light windows manager to make it a bit friendly for my family... About 10 years ago I tried to install trisquel on it but it just freezes in the OS boot up I realize this make little practicle sense, but It's my first laptop and has a lot of sentimental value... Plus, I want to brag about having a functional 30 year old computer running on Linux 😎🤓🤭 Any help will be much appreciated! Anywho.

Replies (4)

@dianea@lgbtqia.space 2026-07-17 23:51

@unicandun@retro.pizza How much memory does that laptop from 1998 have? My laptop from 1997 had 64MB, which was a lot back then, but ran the Enlightenment Window Manager very fast.

Open ##3898340
@dazo@infosec.exchange 2026-07-18 00:17

@unicandun@retro.pizza Likely you need a pretty small Linux distro for 32-bit Intel (x86_32, i686). IIRC my first worklaptop was a ThinkPad A21p, that had 64MB RAM and an i686 CPU at round 600MHz. That was from early 2000 or late 1999. Your specs might not be too far away. I used it with Slackware 7 back in those days. But I don't recommend recovering such old distros if intend to put it online. DSL (Damn Small Linux) and Puppy are probably reasonable alternatives if they are still alive and kicking.

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@unicandun@retro.pizza 2026-07-18 00:04

To all who have replied many thanks. I trie AntiX Linux... But haven't been able to run xwindows... So cli for now... But it is functional 🤓

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@wilpercy@beige.party 2026-07-17 23:44

@unicandun@retro.pizza try editing your post by adding hashtags. #fedihelp #Linux #ReduceRepairReuseRecycle

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