What’s the best lightweight Linux distro?

“Strict criteria

“The simple truth is that you’ll be getting your fingers
slightly grubbier with a low-resource distro than you would with a
fully featured one.

“In selecting our shortlist, we’ve left out some contenders
either because they didn’t support older processors, they wouldn’t
install in 4GB or less of space, they simply didn’t work on our
hardware or they’re no longer being maintained (as is the case for
both RULE and U-Lite). The one exception to this is Damn Small
Linux – although it has been over a year since the last release,
and the homepage is as quiet as the LXF office at 9.30 on a Monday
morning, this is still such a widely used and influential project
that it was considered worthy of inclusion.

“There’s still plenty of activity in the area of low-resource
distros, including WattOS, which we hope to cover next time. We
also gave Zenwalk a try, but ran into difficulty trying to run it
on the low-spec system that we permitted ourselves here. But aside
from this, it’s a light and capable distro nonetheless and worth a
look if you have the time. How we tested

“The main idea of this test was to see how well these distros
would run in a restrained environment. To this end, they were
tested, where possible, on an ancient Compaq laptop with 256MB RAM,
Vesa graphics, a 4GB hard drive and a 200MHz Pentium processor. For
the sake of sanity, all distros were then also tested in a Qemu
virtual environment with the same limitations, but this time using
one half of a 3GHz Core 2 Duo processor.”

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