Comparing PCLinuxOS with Windows XP on a PIII Box

My friend Nikhil has been working on a HP Deskpro for more than a decade. It came with 500Mhz PIII CPU, 10GB HDD and 128MB RAM. It had Windows ME preinstalled. Shortly after a few months Nikhil removed that ME and installed Windows 2000, then a few months later Windows XP. He is running the same till now despite having some hiccups of viruses and malware.

He would visit me often and have a breathtaking look at my PCLinuxOS based latest Pentium box and request me to install the same on his old HP box.

I was sceptic at first go, would PCLinuxOS install on 128 MB RAM and 500 MHz CPU? In fact, it did not. Then I tried several others including Zenwalk, Xubuntu, NimbleX, Poppy, DSL and Antix. Of this lot only Mepis Antix worked well, each of the rest had some problems - we could not get a decent GUI after installing Zenwalk and Poppy and NimbleX could not detect the Ethernet card.

Nikhil is broken at heart, he did not like to run Antix. For him everything in Linux except PCLinuxOS is a tradeoff. He just wondered why can’t he install PCLinuxOS while there is no problem in installing XP despite I told several times that XP is almost a decade old software developed to run on the likes of PIII whereas PCLinuxOS is a modern OS which requires more memory and cpu.

He requested me to remaster a PCLinuxOS that will install and run well on his PIII box and would just have the features of XP, and nothing more… I am just planning to remaster one with generic kernel, minimal set of KDE and a set of applications in one app per task basis.

Anybody working towards this? Please send your inputs as comments. I will greatly value them.