TinyMe PCLinux OS

tinyme:home � MyPCLinuxOS: PCLinuxOS Projects


I was having a heck of a time finding a lightweight distro that would work on my Toshiba Satellite 4100XDVD A PII 400MHz relic from the Win 98 days. One of the biggest problems that this machine posed, was that it's video card wasn't being supported well by some of the lightweight Linux Distributions. I did have Ubuntu 7.10 up on it (took forever to install, and ran incredibly slow). I tried the xfce desktop with it, still had to edit the xorg.conf file, to reflect a color depth of 16 vs the standard 24 for a 1024x768 screen. Spent a good half of a day. Then I find PCLinux's TinyMe's project.

Tiny Me Loaded up within the less then 200k of available ram, found what it needed to get online with my wifi connection. It did perform well, given the age of this computer. While it too didn't give me a quick choice to change the screen's color depth at startup or during install, it did give me the options in one of the configuration menus. Changed that, and viola! Full screen. When asked if I wanted to do a full disk install, it lacked the programs to wipe out the current drive and start fresh. While this might be by design, as a safety factor for those who are new to Linux from deleting their Windows or ? Data, it was a ding, but definitely not a show stopper for me.

Another ding would be that I couldn't move or find how to resize the icons on the desktop. Some of the stock text of their icons overlapped on my desktop making it hard to see what was going on.

A couple of nice things on their menu, but I didn't try them, was the choice to re-spin the distro, and to install on a USB drive.

I look forward to having the time to put this on a USB stick, and trying it out. I most certainly would recommend this distro to someone.