Ok Linuxheads, I need your help. I have an old Toshiba Portege 7100 that I think is from 1999. It has a 500mhz processor and 99MB of RAM. I need a micro mini Linux distro that will run on it. I’ve tried the following and only one of them worked but I’m not going to tell you which one yet.
The distros I’ve already tried are Puppy Linux, Mepis Antix, Xubuntu, and Fluxbuntu.
I challenge you to find me a Linux distro to work on this abomination of a laptop.
The Trench Reynolds Report 
Out of the ones listed I select Puppy Linux as the one that worked. DSL should work also.
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If you’re up for a bit of a challange, want something tweaked to your system’s hardware, and don’t mind building up from a fairly basic environment, you could always try Gentoo. It takes more work to get set up and into a working graphical environment, but if you have the time and the willingness to make it work, it can pay off with software tweaked to your hardware and only the software you need and want.
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Hi there.
gOS may be an idea http://www.thinkgos.com
Get the 2.0 version with Enlightenment.
Runs my laptop great. Im sure 100MB RAM is enough.
If you want barebones but still great, try Damn Small Linux, it runs on 12MB and possibly 50MB with Firefox and IM loaded.
Gentoo as above is very quick and you can do whatever you want and build however you want. But remember, it’s all source.
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Thanks everyone for the suggestions. And Richard as always you’re correct it was Puppy that did work but it just didn’t ‘feel’ right to me if that makes sense.
I’m going to try gOS as soon as their website comes back up.
Gentoo is an interesting suggestion. I’ve heard a lot of great things about Gentoo but not for old hardware. It does sound like a weekend project thought.
DSL is going to be my last resort.
Thanks again everyone and please feel free to keep the suggestions coming.
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i actually liked Puppy. it was kind of limited as to what programs you could run on it, but for what i was using it for it worked just fine. it’s just that the computer itself was slower than molasses in January.
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I like Damn Small Linux ( http://www.damnsmalllinux.org ) for older hardware.
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I would suggest Arch.
It will take some manual labor, but it’s a fast lightweight distro.
kr
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