Lightweight Distros

[sdfgeoff]

I'm OS-hunting again for my "crap-top" a brick of a laptop.

I have been running linux mint 11 for about half a year, but have been getting tired of a long boot time (over a minute 30)
Before that I ran ubuntu 10.10, and that ran well, if a little harsh on the memory usage.
I thought to try ubuntu 11.10, and that is impossible on an older machine. 2min boot (excluding login) and a little clunky when running.

So I thought to look at a specific lightweight distro.

Specs of my machine:
1.7ghz single core (this is fine, about equivalent to modern netbooks)
256mb ram (I think this is where the problem is, as all computers these days have 1gb or more)


Tried:
INX (quite fun to play with, but useless
Bodhi (runs well in "live" mode, but crashes on install)
Puppy (Light on processor, but very heavy on ram, as it loads completely into ram for running)


So, any thoughts?

P.S Must be able to run Descent Rebirth

[vision]

Damn Small Linux is the smallest disto I've ever used, and by used I mean played around with for about 2 days.

When I think lightweight, I tend to switch between Mint's LXDE and this one Fedora XFCE spin I found. Each one has features I want in the other, heh. I imagine these are still too heavy for you, but I use them on a laptop I have from 2002 (Pentium III with 512 RAM, 16MB video) and they work pretty good. That's my "travel computer," the one I use to do light work when I'm out of town.

EDIT: You know, scratch what I said above. I now remember trying to run both of those with 256MB of RAM and they didn't hold up too well.

[Thenior]

A 1:30 is too long to wait for a boot?

[vision]

A 1:30 is too long to wait for a boot?

That's what I was thinking too. 1:30 is how long it takes my Mint machine to boot, which is about 3 times as fast as my phone (Android). I think 1:30 is reasonable.

[sdfgeoff]

I'm used to our families computer, which is 1.6ghz dual core, 2gb ram and boots in under 30sec I guess.
It's probably unreasonable to expect a lesser computer to boot in a similar time.

[Thenior]

Well, especially something like a "craptop". I have a quad core here at work, but it takes a few minutes to get totally going. Even my Intel i7 at home takes about a minute.

[Krom]

Well, especially something like a "craptop". I have a quad core here at work, but it takes a few minutes to get totally going. Even my Intel i7 at home takes about a minute.

That is probably more the fault of the hard drive and memory rather than the processor. My newest system gets from BIOS to a fully usable and working Windows 7 desktop in about 15 seconds thanks to a SSD and 8 GB of RAM.

[Foil]

Krom is right. Booting actually doesn't use that much cpu time; most of it is hard-drive access.

[snoopy]

Here's the secret to fast linux boot times:

Compile your own kernel, and only compile in what you need.

DSL or something of the sort will give you decent results, but if you really want fast boot times, use something like gentoo & don't compile in anything that you don't absolutely need. It'll take time for you to figure out what you do and don't need, and to do the compilations, but you'll get the best boot times out of it. Basically, you're eliminating the amount of stuff that needs to be loaded into memory.

Also: Don't run X if you don't have to. If you're going to run X, do your homework and run a lightweight window manager instead of any of the desktop environments. I use openbox, a lot of people use awesome when they're looking for light-weight. Boot into terminal & then startx instead of running a boot manager.

(I don't remember if rebirth needs X) - if it does have it start its own X session.