GALPon MiniNo needs only 64 MB RAM

It's been a while since I actively updated this blog. At the moment it seems that I might be able to make a comeback with this blog that really needs some updated content.


During the hiatus of my blog, several new distributions meant for old computers and hardware with limited resources have entered the market. Thus there are plenty of new topics to blog about!


When I started this blog, old computers were very limited by today's standards. Thus lightweight linux distributions might today address hardware that would have been very modern a couple of years ago. Even my main desktop at home is probably seen very old by many computer hobbyists.


Because of this, I was happy to find out that some of the new distros would still run on hardware made in the 1990's. One of this for me new distros is GALPon MiniNo that requires only 64 Mb RAM, 1.5 Gb disk space and a 200 MHz CPU. According to the techical specifications published on the project's website, the optimal requirements are a bit higher: 128 Mb RAM and 600 MHz CPU.


This, of course, means there is no place for GNOME or KDE. Instead of these, GALPon uses a tailored version of IceWM as desktop and ROX-Filer. The custom theme is very GNOME like which makes it easy to use even for the non-geek Linux users.


The latest release 1.2 was released almost 18 months ago. The distro seems to be actively developed -- I'll certainly test the distro after the next release!

Links: GALPon MiniNo Home Page.

6 comments:

harsha said...

Nice to see a new post. I have been following this blog for a while and am happy to see there are still systems being developed for the 90s hardware.

Mikko said...

It is equally nice to have readers comment on my blog!

I just noticed that there are still 300-400 visitors daily to this blog. It seems there is still demand for new content :)

Anonymous said...

I have been running Galpon Minino on my wife's computer for several years and it is really a little gem that deserves a more international following. She has a very old computer but is able to connect, through Citrix to her computer at work and thus is able to spend more time at home with me which makes me happy (most of the time).

Anonymous said...

I had galpon minino in a pentium III 850mhz laptop for a year and it run really well. Now I have puppy linux, but I'm thinking back to minino because puppy is ugly and I miss the small upper panel applications. I tried to copy them to puppy because it also works with rox-filer, but no luck.

Mikko said...

Great to have some feedback from Minino users! Your comments make me really want to try it in the future.

Ronnybull said...

I like very much Minino, it is really fast in my PIII 128Mb RAM. At first I was confused with the applications menu. Would be good if only they used top panel to launch applications, it is faster and has large icons and you can arrange the icons in the place you want easily.
One of the things I like is how they modified rox, rox menus are clear and have interesting features, try this: to select multiple files at once and try to rename ... coooool :-)