Hi. New here. VectorLinux is AWESOME! Need a little advice.

[ibi]

Hi, All. Last June I decided to learn what Linux was, so ever since I've been experimenting with a number of distros (Fedora, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, PCLinuxOS) on a couple old desktops I have.

I discovered VectorLinux this week when I got it on my mind, for whatever reason, to get an ancient laptop that I had lying around going again. And I mean ancient:

Dell Inspiron 3000 (from 1997!!!), 233 Mhz CPU, 80 MB RAM, 4 GB HD. LOL! I know, it's really pushing it. But, guess what? VectorLinux Light gave it new life!

Not to say I didn't have problems on the install. But not because of the hardware; I think I made some errors in choosing what packages to install. Because of the tiny HD, I tried to get by with just the barest minimum install, cause all I really want to do with this machine is Web browse/email and experiment with networking to my other computers.

Well on my first two installation attempts, I think the combination of packages I selected wasn't complete because on the initial bootup, it failed (saw a line saying "file system not clean"). GUI would hang, never gave me a screen. And with TUI, "startx" command resulted in "bailing" because X wasn't present.

So on the third attempt, I just installed every single package and option available, and everything's working just great. But I know I'm using up way more of my precious 4 GB HD than I need to.

Could anyone recommend the absolute barest minimum selection of packages to install that will still work? I would really appreciate it.

I find it hard to believe that any distro could get an antediluvian machine like mine running and yet still be a great option for a modern system. Simply amazing! Really. You guys deserve a lot of credit. And now I'm probably going to install VectorLinux on my two "old Linux" desktops, too....

Thanks, guys!

[stretchedthin]

Hello;
Thanks for the kind words.  Your right, VL covers the hardware from old to new better than any I've seen.  Really this OS should get a press agent or something.  lol

[nightflier]

Nice to hear it is working for you.

The big space consumers on the VL6 Light install CD are:
kernel source
dev bulk package
jre

You should get a working system with X by de-selecting everything except the X11 bulk.

It used to be that "just web browsing" didn't require much processing power, with a modem connection being the bottle neck anyways. Not any more. Web pages are more like web apps, gobbling up more and more computer resources. 

Your machine will be great for your networking experiments though. One hint: try using the command "mc" in text mode. It will launch the Midnight Commander, a very powerful text mode tool. Once you get used to it, you can work on remote and local computers with equal speed and efficiency.

Have fun! 

[ibi]

Thanks both of you for getting back to me. OK, I'm going to reinstall selecting just X11 bulk, as I currently have only 123 MB free of my 3 Gig root partition 

I have a couple other questions I couldn't find answers to in searching the forums. I was able to use the package manager to update my system. That was easy and much like other distros I've used. Then I noticed in the package lists, the most current version of Firefox available from the repos is 3.6. So do people normally just install newer browser versions directly with tar files?

The other thing I checked out was installing wine. I found it easily enough in the repos, but the package manager gave me a long list of missing dependencies. Is there a way to tell the package manager to just install all those files as well? If not, then how do most people normally install wine?

I hope these aren't stupid questions. Thanks again.

[nightflier]

Questions not stupid at all.

Most of the current development effort is expended on VL7. Keeping VL6 up to date will require some manual labor and yes, official tarballs.
Here is a brief discussion on updating Firefox: http://forum.vectorlinux.com/index.php?topic=14007.msg84989#msg84989

To make available a broader range of applications and dependencies, make sure you have "extra" and "testing" enabled in the gslapt sources. Gslapt gives you the option of continuing without all deps. You can manually install packages to try to satisfy deps where the version number is a little off. Wine is a fast moving target though, it may or may not work. Besides, you are usually better off finding Linux apps to do what you're trying to do in wine.

Note: Be very careful about removing packages using gslapt. You may end up removing other packages you want to keep. Use "removepkg" instead.

[ibi]

That's precisely the info I was looking for. Thank you for that!

[hata_ph]

If you don't mind of using UNOFFICIAL distro. Try VL7 Light which i think work most of the time

http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/veclinux-7.0/iso-test/VL7.0-Light-Live-A5.iso