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[Rambling about linux] [not even drama] Did you know ubuntu mates BASE install size is 8gb?

Fricking bloat!

I'm trying to find a distro that fits entirely in the 8gb so I can fit it entirely in ram on an old dell I fixed so I can use it as a snappy little streaming box (because I don't have a spare harddrive and am too lazy to buy one).

Ubuntu mate (A supposed "lightweight" distro!) BASE install is much too fat to fit (remember I need to fit the whole OS, all installed programs plus firefox/chrome/MPV into 8gb of ram).

Antix is nice at 750mb, but it doesn't include the display drivers out of the box and doesn't include any easy way to install them (and to boot lshw on my dell returns many weird and some outright wrong infomation)

Neither ubuntu or antix managed wifi drivers, or even to detect the card.

My point is devshits have pissed away 10 years of hardware advancement and could u plz recommend a distro

20
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You’ll probably run into libc issues but Alpine Linux explicitly has a tool for setups like this.

https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_local_backup

I’m curious what GPU you are using (these “lightweight” distros are targeting like 2000s era hardware. 2015 isn’t really that slow for these distros), why you can’t increase the RAM on a 2015 era machine, and especially why you can’t get a cheap SSD. Hard drives are balls but I have Macintoshes from the 90s that I can boot from an SD card. There’s zero reason to use spinning rust ever as a boot drive.

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and especially why you can’t get a cheap SSD

This is a salvage machine and I think someone literally ripped the harddrive out at one point. Ribbon connectors are damaged and I can't get it to see any hard drives I put in.

I'll keep it around until I get another I can strip for parts

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Ribbon connectors? Is this 2015 or older?

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Is this 2015 or older?

It's 2013 or 2014 I forget which

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Is it SATA or IDE?

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SATA

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Gotcha, I’ve never heard the term used for SATA cables.

Yeah that’s unfortunate if the port got ripped off.

What’s the GPU situation like? Id understand the issues if it’s Nvidia or older AMD but Intel should be very painless with only a few exceptions.

Another fix might be getting a PCIe SATA controller so you can actually connect a drive.

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What’s the GPU situation like? Id understand the issues if it’s Nvidia or older AMD but Intel should be very painless with only a few exceptions.

:#marseyshrug:

All the dells from this era are like this, displays don't work without nomodeset until you fiddle for a while/update the drivers

I ended up throwing the latest ubuntu and that worked out of the box so I'm assuming there was a driver bug that got fixed

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Hm that is curious. I thought 2015 was past the days of nomodeset

The good news is Alpine has support for mainline kernels with the linux-edge package if you decide to play with that. Clearly Ubuntu is ideal though.

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