That was interesting to hear about shells for Windows. I know it is possible to make Windows go faster by tweaking settings and loosing lots of graphical effects, but now I am wandering if it is possible to strip windows down to something really light and still manager to use, say, msoffice, and IE. I probably won't be trying to do this for a while myself as I only intend to use Windows if I absolutely have to. But friends and family might benefit from having a really stripped down Windows PC.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this. Yes of course I'd prefer them to have linux (probably Ubuntu or Mint).

Cheers!
Andy

Every heard of Citrix? You can use their services with Windows and get at least some UNIX or Linux-like experience.

Cygwin offers a complete (and completely free, unlike Citrix) Bash and command utilities experience for Windows. Red Hat acquired them a long time ago and very effectively uses their rather rich set of tools to provide a UNIX-like experience (using GNU utilities) on Windows systems. You can get it, as far as I know, completely free, even today, and run it on Windows. You can even get an X server that runs on Windows.


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://cygwin.com/install.html"
linktext was:"http://cygwin.com/install.html"
====================================

Thanks for the Cygwin link. I'll have a look for future reference.

Antixity wrote:Thanks for the Cygwin link. I'll have a look for future reference.

My pleasure. If ya can't avoid Windows entirely, and you can get away with downloading stuff, you can make your Windows system almost look and behave like a Linux system! __{{emoticon}}__

Hi everyone,
I'm new on this forum and new to AntiX Linux.. I've found this awesome distro through distrowatch.. getting used to it, it's much faster than any other linux I've tried on my old pc. (it's an AMD k-6 450MHz with 320 mb sdram and integrated graphics). The version I'm currently using is M11-486.

cheers,
jocy

Greetings! Enjoy!

jocy wrote:Hi everyone,
I'm new on this forum and new to AntiX Linux.. I've found this awesome distro through distrowatch.. getting used to it, it's much faster than any other linux I've tried on my old pc. (it's an AMD k-6 450MHz with 320 mb sdram and integrated graphics). The version I'm currently using is M11-486.

cheers,
jocy

Hello! I think m11 was great. Or maybe it was just that I finally got used to it...
Have fun with it!

rust collector wrote:Hello! I think m11 was great. Or maybe it was just that I finally got used to it...
Have fun with it!

Yes, antiX M11.0 was very good, and yet the antiX 12.0 project offers even more. The size of software continues to expand, and the full edition now consumes most of a complete CD. Thankfully, for those who have really aging systems, the base configuration offers a more minimal collection of software, really including only the base system and a graphical user environment, around which you can choose the software your system can handle. The antiX core configuration takes that a step further, only including the core system kernel and utilities, plus the tools to assist you in the installation and configuration of your own completely customized system.

While that may be a bit much for the first time hobbyist or experimenter, most will find the full edition very easy to deal with. Only this morning, I installed a fresh antiX 12.0 full system on my neighbor's decade old system and it works great.

I got early retired after 35 years in the electronics test business, but didn't want to completely give up any involvement in electronics. I had purchased an Apple II for my (then young) daughters, and played with that. As a part of my job, I used over the years CPM, pc-dos, ms-dos, and Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, and XP. On a lark, I bought a used K7 machine off craigslist, and downloaded and installed Ubuntu 6.06. I don't even remember where I heard about it. I was impressed with how well it worked and love the free software philosophy. Today I have about 15 machines (P1-"6" & AMD) running various forms of Linux, Unix, and OSX. The Apples don't impress me that much with their usability; I much prefer having the control that I get with Unix and Linux. I read about antiX in Linux Format, and decided to try it on this K6 machine that I bought from craigslist for $20, and it really runs great. Thanks, anticapitalista and the antiX team!

After using and programming (as a hobby) c+4, c16, ZX-Spectrum, C64, Enterprise 128k, finally I started to use PC's in 1994. I always wanted a fast, efficient and resource friendly OS.

Under DOS I have replaced Northon Commander (iirc 5.8 MB) with volkov commander (110 KB).
Dos, Win 3.11 - manually edited config.sys and autoexec.bat to get access to more ram (unused blocks in highmem)

Win95: I have replaced the SHELL to free up some memory. In windows.ini or system.ini there was a line specifying shell. Replaced 'iexplore.exe,4' with taskman. Also deleted some system folders to free up ram and hdd space. Actually I have run heroes3 RoE+AB+SoD (min. req: 133 MHz CPU, 32 MB RAM, ~1.2 GB free HDD) on 100 MHz cpu, 16 MB RAM, 1.08 GB HDD.

Win98SE: Some viruses had 'system' flag or invalid path under Win, but I was able to remove them under DOS. Added a second panel with icons and my own menues. Also deleted *.chm and similar things to speed up the system.

WinXP: here I tweaked the system more heavily. Looked like Windows server edition 2003 with a second panel. Upper panel with app launch icons and menues, other with taskbar. (Just move a folder to the edge of the screen, to get a panel. You may have to delete desktop.ini) Started to wonder if there is a virus free edition. :)

Ubuntu 6.05: A friend of mine said, that it is faster, than WinXP, and completely virus free. The default gnome environment looked like my tweaked windows (two panels, widgets, desktop icons) and it was really resource friendly. Without a realtime virus protection or configured firewall it was way faster, then WinXP.
..
Ubuntu 10.10: Every new edition become a little bit larger, less stable with more broken stuff and also slower, but came with more capabilities. (I remeber to tweak the system to get usb working in an earlier version.) Clearly the development cycle was overstressed.

So I tried 11.04 with Unity, and stopped at 10.10. Until the repo's also stopped working. So I moved to 12.04, tried out Unity disaster again, and than installed every avalaible DE and WM. Finally settled down with MATE (actively developed gnome2 fork).

I will get a new HDD (Seagate Barracuda 2 TB sata 3, ~195 MB/s) for Xmas. Decided to make a clean install without Unity, so started to install and test a few dozen distro's recommended for 'really old hardware'. Distrowatch was useful. (BTW, I have a Sempron 2800+ single core 1.6 GHz, 2x512 MB DDR400 RAM, Radeon 9200 SE AGP 8x, 250 GB IDE HDD, Abit KU8.)

The closest hits were AntiX, Swift, Descent|OS, Tinycore, Slitaz, Galpon MiniNo, DSL, Crunchbang, Connochaet OS, Salix, Zenwalk, SNOW linux, Debian+XFCE, Lubuntu, Bodhi (and SystemrescueCD :).
I narrowed down the search to debian based, actively developed distro's with access to large repo's (debian, ubuntu, mint).
Finally picked up AntiX. After installing MATE on it, I'm calling it my MantiX. :)
Tomorrow my HDD arrives, hopefully AntiX will install on real hardware. Thanks for developing.

Coming in here today with one of the antiX core images that I built myself on my Lenovo 3000 Series Y410 laptop; this is a nice image.

Here is a layout of the specs on this system:
... Interesting; the specs seem to suggest or indicate that this system was created, not with antiX core, but with antiX base. I am pretty sure that is NOT the case; I customized it myself. I may have, however, used a CD download image that identified itself as base; if so, that's the only explanation I have (unless selective memory loss is another possibility). I have installed MANY versions of antiX full, base, and core since the earliest days back in 2006, and many MEPIS releases going back to May 2003!

Brian, try editing the / etc/antix-version file.

BitJam wrote:Brian, try editing the / etc/antix-version file.

Yeah, I can do that; I'm just a bit curious why the name showed up the way it did... doesn't affect performance in any way; they ALL work great.

Hi to all,

I've used several different distros through the years including Red Hat, Debian, and Mint. I prefer elegant lightweight applications and have used Fluxbox for years. I realized that I did not need a distro that provides the heavyweight systems like Gnome and KDE.

I use the vi editor a lot and rely on the system beep or bell as a way of telling me if I have made an error w/o looking at the screen and telling me that I am in command mode. It is also a fun tool to use to teach elementary programming. Distros have increasingly disabled the system beep, without any clear way to re-enable it, but it works in AntiX for now.

I'm very impressed with AntiX so far. I appreciate the work that went into the selection of the Fluxbox settings.

bkinetic

Hello all


I spent my career in computing, starting as a programmer in 1966 on a second generation Honeywell mainframe.

I ended up running a software house that I switched from small mainframes to *nix systems about 1983 (Zilog with System VII, Altos with SCO, then RS6000 with AIX amongst others).

When I retired to France in 2001 I started with a small Windows laptop at home, and quickly realised why I had avoided Microsoft for all those years.

Since then I am totally Linux on 5 systems (three netbooks, a latge laptop, and this very old Acer laptop:-


System: Host: antiX1 Kernel: 3.5.0-antix.2-486-smp i686 (32 bit)
Desktop: Fluxbox 1.3.2 Distro: antiX-base Edelweißpiraten 06 August 2012
Machine: System: Acer product: Aspire 1350 version: 3A24
Mobo: Acer model: Aspire 1350 version: Rev.A Bios: Acer version: 3A24 date: 12/01/2003
CPU: Single core Mobile AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (-UP-) cache: 512 KB flags: (sse) clocked at 1393.150 MHz
Graphics: Card: VIA KM400/KN400/P4M800 [S3 UniChrome]
X.Org: 1.12.3 drivers: openchrome (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: 1024x768@60.0hz
GLX Renderer: N/A GLX Version: N/A
Audio: Card: VIA VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller driver: snd_via82xx Sound: ALSA ver: 1.0.25
Network: Card: VIA VT6102 [Rhine-II] driver: via-rhine
IF: eth0 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: 00:c0:9f:39:60:3e
Drives: HDD Total Size: 30.0GB (4.9% used) 1: id: /dev/sda model: IC25N030ATMR04 size: 30.0GB
Partition: ID: / size: 26G used: 1.4G (6%) fs: ext3 ID: swap-1 size: 2.18GB used: 0.05GB (2%) fs: swap
Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 50.0C mobo: N/A
Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A
Info: Processes: 68 Uptime: 18:29 Memory: 148.1/183.1MB Client: Shell inxi: 1.8.14



With such little core I have struggled to find a really lightweight distro, and have recently been using DamnSmallLinux, which was fine but not terribly elegant and without a lot of up-to-date software.

I found AntiX through Distrowatch and can't beleieve that I had never heard of it, or Mepis, before.

Although all the other computers are running some variant of Ubuntu, I find AntiX amazingly good - it has breathed new life into this ancient system (with only about 184 meg RAM).

Everything is looking good - thanks to the developer(s)!