Old Machine? Try antiX Linux

As the long-time readers know, I’m always looking for Operating System options suitable for the older hardware — especially my beloved old IBM Thinkpad 600e. Just back in September I thought I had hit upon the perfect solution: Dual-booting Windows 2000 and Puppy Linux. However, after just a few weeks I stopped using Puppy due to some browser issues and was back to full time Win2K.

Not that Windows 2000 is a bad OS, mind you, but … *yawn*. Boring. Sure, it works great on the old hardware, no doubt. It’s from that era, after all. Just a bit of “been there, done that” to the whole thing.

Fortunately, I learned of another Linux distribution this week that is aimed at the older hardware: antiX.

antiX is a fast, lightweight and easy to install linux live CD distribution based on MEPIS for Intel-AMD x86 compatible systems. antiX offers users the “Magic of Mepis” in an environment suitable for old computers. So don’t throw away that old computer yet! The goal of antiX is to provide a light, but fully functional and flexible free operating system for both newcomers and experienced users of Linux. It should run on most computers, ranging from 64MB old PII 266 systems with pre-configured 128MB RAM to the latest powerful boxes. 128MB RAM is recommended for antiX.

It offers two lightweight window managers: fluxbox and IceWM. Both are configured nicely and both are definitely light-weight, especially if you’re used to Gnome or KDE. I prefer the fluxbox configuration but the machine appears to prefer icewm as everytime I reboot, that’s where I start. Weird, but not the end of the world… I need to sort out why that’s happening some other day.

For browsers we have Firefox 3 and Dillo. I still think Firefox3 is a bit “heavy” for these older distros but, compared to Dillo, at least it renders sites as one would hope to see them. Dillo is certainly light-weight and very fast, but it seems to work best with the sites from the 90s (and that’s not always a bad thing if we ignore <blink> tags!). I may have a try at upgrading to the newer Dillo 2 and see how that works, though.

Aside from web browsing, the other main use of this machine is to run Hamachi (w/ gHamachi GUI) and remote desktop to a machine at work. And for that, it works great.

It is an easy distro to work with and using the apt based package stuff is familiar. So far, I haven’t had any issues installing stuff which is a plus when working with these “for old machines” distributions. Only real issues I’ve had relate to the window managers (above) and the age old challenge of getting sound working on this laptop (I found some good posts at the mepis forums though, so hopefully that’ll be resolved soon).

antiX is definitely worth a look if you want to keep some older hardware alive and functional. Heck, it is worth a look for newer hardware too. Nice and small with low hardware requirements and a common package management system are all pluses. And the end result doesn’t feel like a compromise.

Possibly Related posts:

1. Another Option for the Old Machine
2. Old Windows Computer? Try K-Meleon
3. More Options for the Old Machine
4. Another Play with Puppy Linux
5. Quick update on the linux / old machine quest