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' 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.
Read the full story on LinuxWatch: Make Mine a Lite, a MEPISLite