| Make mine a Lite, a MEPISLite |
Sep. 21, 2005
Do you hate to see a good computer go to waste? I know I do.
I have half-a-dozen Pentium II machines, which came with Windows 98SE. If I trusted Windows 98SE to be even half-secure, I'd still be using them. But I don't.
So what to do with old boxes? Well one good thing is to run MEPIS's lightweight Linux distribution, MEPISLite.
MEPISLite 3.3.1-2, a late beta version, is designed from the ground-up to be a fully functional Linux system that will run on a Windows 98 class machine. It is reported to run on as little as a Pentium II system with 128MB of RAM and a 2GB hard drive.
I believe it.
There are, of course, many other small Linux distributions. Zenwalk (formerly Minislack), Puppy Linux, and Damn Small Linux, to name a few. All have their fans.
Still, I think MEPISLite deserves anyone's attention.
For starters, it is a complete desktop Linux system. You're not going to sit down at MEPISLite and find yourself wishing for functionality that's not there.
Oh, of course, you have to work with KOffice, instead of OpenOffice.org, but for day-in, day-out work, KOffice does every bit as well as the more feature-full OpenOffice.org.
And -- this is the good part -- it will do it all on very old, very slow machines.
In my case, I put MEPISLite on a white-box system with an 800MHz Via processor, 128MB of RAM and a 20 GB hard drive. This box barely ran Windows ME, and cried like a beaten dog at the thought on running Windows XP.
Of course, one could argue that Windows ME barely ran at the best of times, but that's another story.
On this system, which might fetch $25 at a yard sale, I was able to happily run not just a bare-bones operating system, but a system that used essentially the entire KDE suite.
Yes, including the GUI, KDE 3.3.2, itself.
Many of the "light" distributions use alternatives to the mainstream Linux GUIs -- KDE and GNOME -- like FVWM95 and FluxBox. Personally, I prefer one of the big two, because along with the GUI, you get access to the programs and tools built around them.
MEPISLite is based on the Debian Sarge distribution, but it's been slimmed down for low-end machines.
So, for example, while it comes with Firefox as a browser, MEPIS recommends that you use Konqueror. Instead of Thunderbird or Evolution for email, it gives you KMail and so on.
In any event, I found that Firefox did just fine on my old heap of a machine.
The other K-programs also did well on my system. Indeed, KWord -- the word processor of the KDE family -- was downright snappy, and I can't think of any office program that ever did better than "acceptable" on that system before.
Unfortunately, it's only version 1.3.5 of KWord, which means that it only imports Microsoft Word 97 and 2000 documents. If you want to bring over Word documents, you're best off exporting them to RTF (Rich Text Format).
Now, you can run OpenOffice.org, which does a much better job of importing Microsoft Office files, but you're not going to be pleased with the performance you'll get on a machine like mine. With a system with 256MB+ of RAM and a GHz+ processor, it would be a different story.
MEPISLite also includes my favorite Linux version of the Windows Network Neighborhood feature, Smb4k. With this, any Windows users on a domain/Active Directory/Samba based network will feel right at home.
Don't think, though, that MEPISLite is just another Debian-based KDE system. It also includes some of my favorite non-KDE programs.
From outside the KDE universe, MEPISLite also includes Skype, the popular VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) program. I had wondered how that would do on my system, since VoIP tends to be very sensitive to any performance problems, but it worked flawlessly for me.
The distribution also includes the GIMP graphics program. Here, as you might guess, its performance was less creditable. Still, it did work well enough that I wouldn't mind doing small jobs on this PC. And, lest we forget, running PhotoShop on this box would be considered torture under the Geneva Convention.
All that is good, but so far there's nothing that I've mentioned that couldn't be done on other small distributions.
MEPISLite sets itself above its competition in several ways.
First, while there is a free as in beer version, you can also buy the program either direct from directly from MEPIS or through TaFusion, MEPIS's reseller and retail distributor, and get additional support.
Pricing has yet to be set for MEPISLite, but given that the CD of the full SimplyMEPIS is $14.95, it won't be much.
MEPISLite also comes with Desktop OnTheGo. This is a unique-to-MEPIS program that enables users to run their entire home directory, including settings and identity, from a USB device.
If security is a concern to you, you can opt to use AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). With this, if someone does snatch your USB device, they aren't going to be able to break into your files.
There are many distributions out there that run off USB devices. However, the MEPIS family is the only one I know of that includes an easy way to take your complete desktop with you in your pocket.
Last, but by no means least, MEPISLite is simply put together well. It is a smooth, clean Linux distribution.
With many smaller distributions, you may get the feeling that you're working with a kit rather than an operating system.
Now, that's fine for Linux gear-heads. But, if you just want to get work done on a slow machine, or introduce someone who's still using Windows 98 or ME to Linux, I haven't seen a better distribution than MEPISLite.
Check it out. I suspect you'll agree.
Suggested minimum system requirements? For practical purposes, I'd say 128MB of RAM, 2GB of hard drive, and 500MHz of processor.
--Steven J. Vaughan Nichols
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