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Konstantin Krivko
Konstantin Krivko

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Running a lightweight Linux distribution on old hardware.

I was drunk on Saturday, on Monday I will need to connect to a conference and learn basic Linux functions because the corporation is moving all OS to Linux.
I had very glitchy hardware, Windows OS would start but other applications would sometimes stop because of errors, I needed Linux on this laptop, I couldn't install it only as a Linux PC because my wife uses it occasionally.


First step. Looking for HyperVisors for Windows. Win 10 has a built-in solution like Hyper-v, but I had Win 7. VMware and VirtualBox were so heavy for this case.
At least I found QEMU/KVM, it seemed like it should work, and it did.
Downloading Qemu from the official site
indows 64-bit:
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I took the stable 2024 distribution for the installation. The latest 2024 release is 20241220.exe.

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Run and agree to all questions
Next, I download Puppy Linux: https://forum.puppylinux.com/puppy-linux-collection.
I click “download” and choose my preferred distribution. I prefer the Debian based one.
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Well, I have short resurse for my hardware then I downloaded 32-bit version of Pupy. Time to run QEMU and run Linux
QEMU which we are have is console tool. Then let's open command prompt and change directory:

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Then we need to create a disk image for the new virtual machine where we will install the distribution, the following command:

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If you get an error like the one shown on the screen above, we need to run a command prompt as administrator:

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So, we are ready to run our OS on this virtual machine:

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And then the OS will start up and we can answer the following questions and get started:

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