clean and light desktop for old hardware

N

nbittech

There are a lot or really cheap old laptops going around these days. How about a desktop for these little p3 p4 and athlon laptops with limited gpu power and 512mb or RAM?

They cost nothing nowdays and would make fun toys when you add BSD.

Fluxbox, Openbox, Windowmaker, IceWM, Awesome, maybe even e16?

Think back to when these were new (2000-2003?) What did you run then? (I ran Fluxbox and KDE3 myself.)

Just so you know, someone at work gave me a Comnpaq 700z, circa 2001, it's an AMD Duron socket A cpu, with 384mb of RAM, a 20gb hard drive, and a VIA savage S3 gpu. (Yes, really, go ahead and laugh already.) I just can't throw it out without getting curious.

Ideas? I know people have hardware like this laying around. Oh, and just to let everyone know, these old laptops usually have serial ports! Really handy for the admin or datacenter guy.
 
Blackbox is really light, good idea.

Blackbox can even look cool when you add a tint2 panel and a cool conky setup.

I have never found a good solution for menus in these light window managers though. Other than manually editing the config file. This is what steers me away from most of the light window managers. If this is a laptop that I don't use often, just a toy, "install and go" is important to me. Eye candy so much isn't.
 
What about something like Fluxbox, but with all of the LXDE apps?
Or Windowmaker and the Xfce4 apps?

I like kde3, but it's dying a horrible, slow death now, so hopefully someone will port Trinity to FreeBSD to replace it, as Trinity is everything I loved about kde3, but useable and stable.
I've heard that CDE is getting close to a possibilty (eventually.)

I'm also just curious what people ran when these laptops were new (1999-2002) or so.

I'm just looking for people who ran FreeBSD 4-5 on laptops. What were people running back then. We can use the same thing now, with FreeBSD 9-10. It's time to go retro with that old laptop, but with modern software, of course. I want to feel like it's still 2002 when I open it, but be reminded that it's still 2012 once I start using it.
 
A few minutes ago in another similar thread I made a post about how to maybe implement .svn on such older laptops. Persons reading this post after a search may find it useful...
 
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