Leanest Linux distro?
 

Which lean & fast Linux distro do you recommend for a

Notebook P3 with only 40 MB RAM?

Gentoo :thumbsup

Ya Gentoo or Slackware but if you add more RAM you could run anything!!!

gentoo is good, some people like debian.

Damn Small Linux

you can see a lineup of various distros at this link
http://distrowatch.com/

no one .. buy a new one ..

:thumbsup

Knoppix STD, runs off a CD only

Definately gentoo. Just make sure you install it from source and don't forget to configure gcc to optimize for size (-Os).

You Gentoo kids crack me up.

What's your beef with Gentoo ?

The endless stream of retards who think that compiling shit on your own hardware somehow makes it faster than using a binary package.

funny site.

Actually it is. Take for instance the chips from the Pentium family. The original Pentium was considers top of the line when it came out; it blew away the 486. Then along came the Pentium II, the Pentium III and now the Pentium 4. The difference between these chips is not just the speed at which they run at but also the architechture of the chip itself. While they are all built on the same x86 core they are vastly different.
If you install your linux distro from a binary package then all the packages have to be compiled so that they will run on all Pentium chips. So while the binary package will run on both the original Pentium and also a moden day Pentium 4 it will not take advantage of the moden day Pentium 4's features hence it will not run as fast as it could. Now if you compile something from source and you tell the compile that you have a Pentium 4 and adjust your compile setting accordingly your binary will only run on a Pentirum 4 or better (hence breaking backward compatability) but also at the same time run faster because it can take advantage of all of the chips features. I've pesonally experienced this and also there are many comparissons available on the net about this.

"Yet, binary distros are riddled with bugs, and are much more annoying to fix given the the cumbersome edit/build package/install package cycle."

"Gentoo is much more optimized in my opinion, it has more support, benefits any hardware circumstances, and runs at at least 20% faster than Redhat."

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

I've yet to get Knoppix to work. Goddamnit.

"I essentially started using Gentoo because my ....ing KDE clock would never show the right time in Red Hat."

thanks for the entertaining link.

Ok, you're right. All binary distros do all their compiling on 486s, and Gentoo is faster because using -O99 and -mpentiumpro opt settings will give you at least a 50% performance increase. I wonder if funroll-loops will accept your quote for their site.

"I started using Gentoo on the desktop and now I've rolled it out as a production server using some great technologies: ReiserFS, RAID-5, Gentoo patched kernel, Samba ... you name it."

does it freeze at "enabling DMA <CD>"?
I had a few systems that would freeze on that line, adding nodma on the commandline fixed it.

No. All binary distros get compiled on Pentiums (even Windows) thus not taking full advantage of the processors capabilities. Gentoo (or anything compiled with the correct flags) will be faster on a more advanced processor then binaries produced for lower end processors. And there is no such thing as -O99 anything higher then 3 will be considered as 3. If you do some searches you can actually find stuff out rather then repeating stuff from the funroll-loops site.
Granted there are people who are taking gentoo optimization to an extreme but then again so are people who overclock their computers or tweak settings in games to get maximum performance from their video cards.

Or try FreeSBIE

Have been using Freesbie for a while, I ran into problems running it on some Dell poweredge servers, so had to switch to knoppix to get it to boot.
I actually am a huge fan of FreeBSD, have used it since 3.2 -RELEASE

I've had better luck with FreeSBIE than I have with Knoppix. Was pleasantly surprised. :)

Yes, likewise, the only problems I ever had with it seemed to be only on certain PowerEdges, and seeing it was more of a time issue (just needed to enumerate the hardware out to a text file for resale of the servers) I didn't mess with it, and just went to Knoppix.
Are you into any of the other BSD's (Open/Net) ?

I played with NetBSD many many moons ago on my Amiga, but now a days it's just FreeBSD.

I have a Sparc Ultra 30 here with Solaris 8.0 on it, I'm going to try the new FreeBSD 64bit 5.x tree, once I buy a drive to replace the one with Solaris on it, I am glad they finally released a version for sparcs, I hated the thought of putting either Open or Net BSD on it.

I will try gentoo and maybe another

drop it, get an iBook :Graucho