Tom's Hardware > Forum > Linux/Free BSD > Linux/Free BSD General Discussion > installing linux on old machine
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Monolitus   11-30-2004 at 07:05:10 AM

hya,

i'm a linux newbie, and therefore i don't actually know the differences between the distros and window managers ...

i have a pentium 2 300MHz with 64mb ram, ati video with 4mb ram and 4 gig hd.

i used win98 until i tried to create a network with XP which didn't work. therefore i've upgraded to XP: 1. the network came alive instantly 2. the computer choked (it needs at least 128mb in order to run only windows ....)

after this long intro i need your advice: i need a linux intallation:
1. which will work on this ancient machine
2. that will have a window manager
3. that will work in a network with the XP gateway seamlessly

thanx in advance.

mono

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folken   11-30-2004 at 05:32:01 PM
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Hm... That is hard to say. Mandrake is a pretty good beginners linux but I don't think the latest version would run so hot on that machine. Knoppix might be the way to go on that, you can just boot it off a cd to a fully working os. Then you can tinker with it with and if you break it just reboot and it will be back to defaults. When you get comfortable with it you can install it to the hd and run it from there.

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

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bjpatrick   11-30-2004 at 10:51:07 PM
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That machine of your is much too slow. I have no clue why people think that linux does not need a good platform to run on. I do not believe that most linux distros will install on a machine with 128 megs of ram if you want a GUI.

bjpatrick@gmail.com

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folken   11-30-2004 at 11:01:56 PM
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Yea, I guess the new guis do require quite a bit. It should still be usable though. I somehow got suse 9 on a pIII550 w/ onboard 2mb shared graphics and 96mb of ram and it worked, it just really really sucked :)

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

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silverpig   12-02-2004 at 08:11:03 AM
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I've run a GUI on a P200 MMX with 80 MB EDO. You just will see slowdowns if you run a heavy gnome or kde environment. Go with a *box (blackbox, fluxbox), or FCE4... maybe IceWM. You could have a gui very very easily with that.

Hell, I use P2 400s that run debian with gnome and kde all the time.

s signature has been formatted to fit your scr

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TKS   12-02-2004 at 04:11:28 PM
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silverpig,

I installed MEPIS Linux on a PII MMX with 64MB RAM and had a fully opped desktop (fluxbox) in a matter of minutes. Plus with apt-get I was able to remove all the dumb packages I didn't need. It wasn't even slow when I was in fluxbox...it ran perfectly fine. Linux friggen rules...try that with winders :p

----------
<b>It is always brave to say what everyone thinks. </b> <i>Georges Duhamel</i>

TKS

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