• Best 32 Bit Linux Download

The first generation (Macmini1,1) has a special place as the best bang-for-buck system that I’ve ever purchased. Purchased for around $1k NZD in 2006, it did a stint as a much more sleep-friendly server back after I started my first job and was living at my parents house. It then went on to become my primary desktop for a couple of years in conjunction with my laptop. And finally it transitioned into a media centre and spent a number of years driving the TV and handling long running downloads.

It even survived getting sent over to Sydney and running non-stop in the hot blazing hell inside my apartment there. My long term relationship on the left and a more recent stray I obtained. Clearly mine takes after it’s owner and hasn’t seen the sun much.

Having now reached it’s 10th birthday, it’s started to show it’s age. Whilst it handles 720p content without an issue, it’s now hit and miss whether 1080p H264 content will work without unacceptable jitter. It’s previously undergone a few upgrades. I bumped it from the original 512MB RAM to 2GB (the max) years ago and it’s had it’s 60GB hard drive replaced with a more modern 500GB model. But neither of these will help much with the video decoding performance. Given we had recently obtained something that the people at Samsung consider a “Smart” TV, I decided to replace the Mac Mini with the Plex client running natively on the TV and recycle the Mac Mini into a new role as a small server to potentially replace a much more power hungry system that performs somewhat basic storage and network tasks. Unfortunately this isn’t as simple as it sounds. The first gen Intel Mac Minis arrived on the scene just a bit too soon for 64-bit CPUs and so are packing the original Intel Core Solo or Intel Core Duo (1 or 2 cores respectively) which aren’t clocked particularly high and are only 32bit capable.

Whilst GNU/Linux.can. run on this, supported versions of MacOS X certainly can’t. The last MacOS version supported on these devices is Mac OS X 10.6.8 “Snow Leopard” 32-bit and the majority of app developers for MacOS have decided to set their minimum supported platform at 64-bit MacOS X 10.7.5 “Lion” so they can drop the old 32-bit stuff – this includes the popular Chrome browser which now only provides 64-built builds. Basically OS X Snow Leopard is the Win XP of the MacOS world. Even running 32-bit GNU/Linux can be an exercise in frustration. Some distributions now only ship 64-bit builds and proprietary software vendors don’t always bother releasing 32-bit builds of their apps limiting what you can run on them.

On the plus side, this earlier generation of Apple machines was before Apple decided to start soldering everything together which means not only can you replace the RAM, storage, drives, WiFi card, you can also replace the CPU itself since it’s socketed! Essentially you can replace the CPUs in the Macmini1,1 (2006) or Macmini2,1 (2007) models with any chip compatible with, the highest spec model available being the Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33 Ghz T7600. At $60NZD for the T7600, it was a bit more than I wanted to spend for a decade old CPU.

However moving down slightly to the T7400, the second hand price drops to around $20NZD per CPU with international shipping included. And at 2.177Ghz it’s no slouch, especially when compared to the original 1.5Ghz single core CPU. It took a while to get here, after the first seller never delivered the item and refunded me when asked about it.

One of my CPUs also arrived with a bent pin, so there was some rather cold sweat moments straightening the tiny pin with a screw driver. But I guess this is what you get for buying decade old CPUs from a mysterious internet trader. I was surprised at the lack of dust inside the unit given it’s long life, even the fan duct was remarkably dust-free.

The replacement is a bit of a pain, you have to strip the Mac Mini right down and take the motherboard out, but it’s not the hardest upgrade I’ve ever had to do – dealing with cheap $100 cut-your-hand-open PC cases were much nastier than the well designed internals of the Mac. The only real tricky bit is the addition and removal of the heatsink which worked best with a second person helping remove the plastic pegs. I did it using a regular putty knife, needle-nose pliers, phillips & flat head screw drivers and one Torx screw driver to deal with a single T10 screw that differs from the rest of the ones in the unit. Recommend testing this things.before. putting the main case back together, they’re a pain to open back up if it doesn’t work first run.

The end result is an upgrade from a 1.5 Ghz single core 32bit CPU to 2.17 Ghz dual core 64bit CPU – whilst it won’t hold much to a modern i7, it will certainly be able to crunch video and server tasks quite happily. The next problem was getting an OS on there. This CPU upgrade opens up new options for MacOS fans, if you hack the installer a bit you can get MacOS X 10.7.5 “Lion” on there which gives you a 64-bit OS that can still run much of the current software that’s available. You can’t go past Lion however, since the support for the Intel GMA 950 GPU was dropped in later versions of MacOS.

Given I want them to run as servers, GNU/Linux is the only logical choice. The only issue was booting it it seems they don’t support booting from USB flash drives. These Mac Minis really did fall into a generational gap. Modern enough to have EFI and no legacy ports, yet old enough to be 32-bit and lack support for booting from USB. I wasn’t even sure if I would even be able to boot 64-bit Linux with a 32-bit EFI Given it doesn’t boot from USB and I didn’t have any firewire devices lying around to try booting from, I fell back to the joys of optical media. This was harder than it sounds given I don’t have any media and barely any working drives, but my colleague thankfully dug up a couple old CD-R for me. “Daddy are those shiny things floppy disks?” I also quickly remembered why we all moved on from optical media.

My first burn appeared to succeed but crashed trying to load the bootloader. And then refused to eject. Actually, it’s still refusing to eject, so there’s a Debian 8 installer that might just be stuck in there until it’s dying days The other unit’s optical drive didn’t even work at all, so I couldn’t even do the pain of swapping around hardware to get a working combination.

Having exhausted the optional of a old-school CD-based GNU/Linux install, I started digging into ways to boot from another partition on the machine’s hard drive and found. This awesome software is an alternative boot manager for EFI. It differs from a boot loader slightly, in a traditional BIOS - Boot Loader - OS world, rEFInd is equivalent to a custom BIOS offering better boot functionality than the OEM vendor. It works by installing itself into a small FAT partition that lives on the hard disk – it’s probably the easiest low-level tool I’ve ever installed – download, unzip, and run the installer from either MacOS or Linux. Final result -2GB RAM, 64bit CPU, delicious delicious GNU/Linux x8664 I can confirm that both 32bit and 64bit Debian works nicely on this box (I installed 32-bit first by mistake) – so even without doing the CPU upgrade, if you want to get a bit more life out of these early unsupported Mac Minis, they’d happily run a 32-bit Debian desktop so you can enjoy wonders like a properly patched browser and operating system.

Not all other distributions will work – Ubuntu for example don’t include EFI support on their 32-bit installer which will probably cause some headaches. You should be OK with any of the major 64-bit distributions since they tend to always support EFI. The final joy I ran into is that when I set up the Mac Mini as a headless box, it didn’t boot it just turned on and never appeared on the network. Seems that the Mac Minis (even the later unibody generation) have some genius firmware that disables the GPU hardware if no screen is attached, which then messes up most operating systems on it. The easy fix, is to hack together a fake VGA load by connecting a 100Ω resister between pins 2 and 7 of a DVI-to-VGA adaptor (such as the one that ships with the Mac Mini). I need to make a tidier/better version of this, but it works! No idea what engineer thought this was a good feature, but thankfully it’s an easy and cheap fix, especially since I have a box littered with these now-useless adaptors.

The end result is that I now have 2x 64-bit first gen Mac Minis running Debian GNU/Linux for a cost of around $20NZD and some time dismantling/reassembling them. I’d recommend these small Mac Minis for server purposes, but the NZ second hand prices are still a bit too expensive for their age to buy specifically for this Once they start going below $100 they’d make reasonable alternatives to something like the Intel NUC or Raspberry Pi for small serving tasks. The older units aren’t necessarily problem free either. Whilst the build quality is excellent, after 10 years things don’t always work right.

Both of my optical drives no longer function properly and one of the Mac Minis has a faulty RAM slot, limiting it to 1GB instead of the usual 2GB. And of course at 10 years whom knows how much longer they’ll run for – but it’s been a good run so far, so here’s to another 10 years (hopefully)! The real limiting factor is going to be the 1GB/2GB RAM long term. Thanks for sharing your saga! I am now recovering my old Mac Mini 2,1 1.83MHz.

It has a OSX 32bit 10.7.5 Lion (you should know it exists) and a Windows 7. There is a Windows 7 compilation in a DVD with a custom bootloader that make possible the dual boot without rEFInd, however, I honestly don’t know exaclty how it works. It was made for old PCs and works with old Macs too (I guess they don’t know). I think you may install 4GB of RAM in your 2,1 Mac Mini, will run really better. You just have to find the right manifacturer, the way the chips are arranged make it visible. I used 4allmemory. Great writeup!

I encountered the same problem with my stock 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo Mac Mini after installing Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server. Considering that I planned on running the machine headless, it didn’t seem necessary to connect a monitor. After some troubleshooting, I connected it to a DVI KVM switcher and bootup proceeded normally. Such a strange design I’ve ordered a T7600 2.3 GHz Core 2 Duo for $17 USD, which should give the machine a little more kick. But I must say that it works great with the stock 1.83 GHz processor and 4 GB RAM (only 3 GB usable).

This entry was posted in and tagged by (updated on ) With the feedback and requests we got from our list, we had to do another list of the best lightweight Linux distros. Actually, some of them fit both our categories. Sure, there are other similar lists our there, but this one has up-to-date info and we’ve personally tried and tested (almost) every distro on our old laptops.

It took us 7 months to compile this list and a few weeks to update it with new data! We’ve seen new lists that included distros with their latest update being in 2005. Come on, how is that distro still relevant and good in 2018? And don’t get us started on how each list is just a rehashed version of the same 5 distros.

We purposefully included many distros in our list so you have more options to choose from. All distros are free and can run on 512MB RAM or less. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, just pick any distro. You don’t have to throw away your old PCs and laptops.

Install a lightweight Linux distro on them and they’re as good as new. Lightweight distros don’t even have to be used on old hardware.

You can install them on some bleeding-edge hardware and get the ultimate performance. Most distros are portable and can run on a Live CD/USB, without a hard drive. Why should you use other OSes full of bloatware and unnecessary stuff when you can use a perfectly fine Linux alternative? If you’re having trouble viewing this article from a lightweight computer, visit the Anyway, before we go on with the list, a few quick tips on how to choose the best one for you: How to choose the best lightweight Linux distro for you These guidelines should help, but if you’re feeling overwhelmed, just pick any distro from the list below and you’ll be fine. Any Linux distro is better than Windows/OS X when it comes to old hardware. Linux distros and the software that runs on them are far more optimized and compatible with old(er) hardware. If you’re using Windows or OS X and it “feels slow”, switch to a Linux distro.

You’re guaranteed to see an improvement in performance. Some older versions of Windows and OS X are fast for older hardware, but they don’t get any support or updates, unlike all distros listed here. Choosing the right lightweight distro will depend on what you’re going to use it for. Some distros are optimized for certain activities, ie.

Are you going to use it for everyday browsing? If so, have in mind that websites have evolved and although the browser and OS itself will perform better, the websites can still be bloated and slow down your Linux. If you’re going to use it for random office tasks like word processing, spreadsheets, or presentations – the lightweight Linux distros will work just fine. Maybe you’d like to use your old laptop as a media device and watch movies on it. You’re good to go, as long as the movie itself is not a full Blu-Ray rip.

Another guideline is how much you’re willing to sacrifice. How much OS features do you really need? You don’t really need all that fancy UI animations and 3D stuff. Some Linux distros do have great modern UIs, but they do require better hardware. Previous e xperience is another big factor you need to consider before you choose a lightweight Linux distro. Are you a beginner? Then don’t use Arch Linux.

Have you used Ubuntu before? Then get a lightweight distro based on Ubuntu.

Got used to the Windows XP interface and want something similar? Sure, we have the perfect distro for you. Pro-tip: do a bit of research for your hardware and see if the distro supports it. It most likely will, but just to be sure, you can do a quick google with your hardware model and the distro and you should get some results. Most distros can run on a cheap USB flash drive – you don’t even need an HDD/SSD.

This is often referred to as a “Live CD/USB”. We’ll include a ‘minimum hardware requirements’ for each distro, so you can check if the hardware stats you have will support the distro. Most of these distros can run perfectly fine on a Raspberry Pi. Shop for Laptops, USB Flash Drives, and More at Newegg. Quick overview of the distros included in our list Now (finally), onto the main part, the best lightweight Linux distros for old computers/laptops.

Click on the distro’s name to find more info, screenshots, and download links. Distro Minimum RAM (MB) Minimum CPU Minimum Disk Space (MB) GUI Release cycle Notes 512 Pentium 4, Pentium M, AMD K8 or newer CPU. I know you’ve probably got 100 comment like this, but I think OBRevenge would have been a great distro to add to this list. OBRevenge is developed by Jody James who has also released KRevenge and Mate Revenge. OBRevenge uses Arch Linux as a base and is unique in the way that Jody uses the Openbox WM with an option of panels from XFCE, Mate and LXDE.

You can also use the wisker menu out of the box. He also includes a couple handfuls of apps created in house to handle graphics drivers, GRUB, Codecs, panel switching, etc. He takes Arch and Openbox and makes it super easy to install and use. It is very very fast and easy to customize. Definitely worth checking out. Jody is also easy to get in touch with on G+ and addresses any bugs or issues very quickly. He has also helped out with the ArchLabs distro project.

(which is another great light weight distro). CFWhitman I noticed that in the chart it lists Debian as having KDE as the desktop. In the screenshot, it appears to show Debian with GNOME 3. Of course, you can choose between several different desktops when installing Debian, of which GNOME 3 is the heaviest and KDE is closer to the heaviest than the lightest. A distribution that is not included which I thought was worth a mention is Salix. Salix Fluxbox is very lightweight, but even Salix Xfce is lighter than a number of the ones included. The repositories for Salix are not extensive, but they have the basics covered.

I run it on an old Pentium 4 Thinkpad from around 2003 (or perhaps 2002) with 1GB of RAM. Kenn I cant have scanned every thing available, but so far as I can tell, most Linux Distro reviews are purty lightweight in themselves. I’d like to see a review come out that tells me if I can customize the clock — can I change the colors of the foreground and background. And does the distro have two panels — top and bottom, and are they customizable in size, icon placement.

Can I really change the desktop names on the work spaces? Can I “easily” install SoftMaker-SoftText apps? Is there decent Bible software available — again easily? What sort of icon does the internet connection have — do I have to guess what that thing in the upper panel is, or is it obv.s?

Again — maybe I’ve missed something over the years, but if so — point the way, hey?! Thanks kenn.

Mike I am looking for a light Linux distro to run on a Wyse R90L Thin Client rig. The limitation is that the thin client only has a 1gig flash memory card – currently it has Windows XP Embedded edition. I also need to be able to run Wine so I can run an APRS program (APRS is tracking program that is used in amateur radio communications). Any recommendations from the list?

I tried Puppy LInux, however, could not get Wine to run under Puppy. I also tried Porteus and it had issues with trying to access repositories – it flashes a message up that it is missing required databases – then when you try to install the databases, it abandons the process. Porteus looks neat and works fine with its built in apps – just will not update. Thanks for your help. AmblestonDack I’ve got an old Asus laptop that has the dreaded SiS 771/671 gfx card. It’s currently running Solus, but its beginning to sun like a stunned slug (not Solus OS fault, just the laptop is soo old).

I’ve tried most lightweight distro’s but I don’t get the default 1200 x 800 display, sometimes I’m lucky after install to get 1024 x 768, usually I get 800 x 600 which isn’t good. So which of these distro’s would you guys recommend for the ol’ laptop? I really don’t want to throw it out as it’s a good machine, except for the SiS gfx card.

Alacrity Fitzhugh In the beginning you say: “Any Linux distro is better than Windows/OS X when it comes to old hardware.” This is not always true. I have an old HP 6715s laptop which has an AMD chipset integrated graphics chip, ATI X1250 to be more accurate. I used to run a linux distro on it, the particular distro name is not important here. I ended up with that choice after going through a handful of them and the one chosen fit my needs best. At that time all the distros I tried were ok. Then the laptop was forgotten for a while. One day I booted it up, noticed that the distro was kinda ancient and decided to find a new one.

Boy that was a mistake. Previously the graphics chip had been supported by the fglrx but no more. The open source “equivalent” just sucks and everything is like a dia show. Also the laptop could not properly boot with acpi enabled with any distro I tried so the disk performance was severely handicapped as well. After half a year of seeking I decided to give up and installed Win7 Pro.

The display driver delivers and acpi is running problemless. So, in this case Windows was a better deal after all.

By the way, following this incident I completely gave up all the AMD/ATI stuff I ever had. No cpus, no graphics, no nothing from AMD any more.

Best 32 Bit Linux Download

Some one I personally used a newly installed Bodhi Linux on my mom’s 10 year old Acer 2 GB RAM (post upgrade from 512 MB), 32 bit, 1.7 GHz Intel Celeron processor laptop. I found it to be much faster than Windows 7 which it was using before. It has only the essential softwares installed on it.

My personal laptop is a 4 year old HP 4 GB RAM, 64 bit, 2.16 GHz Quad Core Intel Pentium IV processor laptop. I am using it with a freshly installed Ubuntu 18.04 gnome desktop. I use Eclipse, MySQL, VS Code, Android Studio, Gimp, Ubuntu Tweaks, Unity Tweak tools and Libre Office on it. I used to have Ubuntu 16.10 and it performed better than Ubuntu 18.04. Ubuntu 18.04 hangs at times and depending on my usage, it also lags a bit, unlike Ubuntu 16.10. I was shocked to find out that the same Libre Office on my mom’s laptop was loading much faster than on my laptop, despite having better specs and being 6 years younger. So, here are my questions: 1.

Are the softwares I am using the reason for my laptop’s poor performance? Are Ubuntu 18.04’s bugs affecting the performance of my laptop? Are they expected to be removed significantly after major Ubuntu 18 updates? Is gnome desktop to be blamed for poor performance? Will changing the desktop improve it?

In order to get better performance should I also move onto Bodhi Linux? Since Bodhi Linux is based on Ubuntu, can I simply copy paste my program files from Ubuntu to Bodhi Linux (if installed on my laptop) and execute them? If yes, can I do that with other(the ones that are not based on Ubuntu) distros as well? Thank you for helping. Post author 1. I wouldn’t say the software itself is the issue. Maybe because 18.04 is still fairly new and some drivers haven’t been patched up properly?

Have you tried 17.10? Bugs may affect the performance of your laptop for sure.

And they should be removed after a major update. You can help by reporting any bugs you notice. On your 4GB laptop, no, GNOME can’t be blamed for the poor performance. 4GB is more than enough for GNOME. You can try an alternative and see how it performs anyway. If you switch to Bodhi you will get better performance no matter what kind of hardware you use.

It’s just more lightweight which means it’s faster. Probably less buggy too, compared to 18.04 now. I haven’t tried this personally, but I doubt it. You can copy files like office files, audio/video etc. But copying actual software without installing it will not work.

David I got my Linux O.S. Start with Ubuntu.

I really like the early Gnome 2 system. When Ubuntu changed to Gnome 3, I was “out of there” and switched to Mint.

Mint was fine. I really liked LMDE 2 and switched to it. Then Mint discontinued LMDE and offered only LMDE Cinnamon! I didn’t like that, so I switched back to Mint Mate. Unfortunately, Mint Mate does not locate available Wifi! So I have gone back to Ubuntu Mate. I have downloaded and tried a lot of Linux Distros.

I copy the installation packages on a DVD with title and my personal “grade”. 95% of the DVD of Distros have a C or D grade. With about 12 years of experience using Linux, I have narrowed my favorites to only about 3 or 4 of all the Linux Distros available. I have to have panels and the ability to place any button that I want on the panel; or, I should say a Mate/Gnome 2 format.

If the Mate does not have a bar pull-down menu, I “drop it”. The bar pull-down menu is the on way to have access to everything on the operating system. I do not like Gnome 3, Unity or Cinnamon; they have very little access and gives you no clue what is available: like driving an automobile without a steering wheel and the windows covered!