Gary_Busey

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I have some old parts and I wanted to put them together to make a Linux machine for software development, but I don't know much about Linux hardware compatibility. Here's what I have:

2GHZ P4 Northwood
Intel Socket 478 Mobo
768mb PC2100 RAM
ATI Radeon 9600
300W Power Supply
Lite-On CD-RW drive

I don't have a hard drive. How large of a hard drive will I need for a Linux machine if I'm just using it to program on? Will everything I have work fine with Linux? Any suggestions on what distribution I should get?
 

nikolokolus

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All of that hardware should work fine. ATI used to have horrible driver support with linux but I've heard it has gotten much better since they started releasing official drivers with full OpenGL support.

As for HD capacity, it depends on what sorts of programs you are compiling and how much storage capacity you need, a linux Distro can be lean and mean or can use up several GB of HD space.

I'm fond of Ubuntu, because of it's debian backbone, great community support, good hardware detection and support.

I've used Suse in the past and it also has very good hardware support . . . only drawback is it's use of redhat package manager (.rpm)
 

Gary_Busey

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Yeah, I was looking at Ubuntu. That's probably what I'll go with. And the ATI driver support was one of the main things I was worried about. Most of the stuff I'll be programming will be school assignments, so nothing to big. I do dabble in some game development though. I'm thinking 40GB should be enough? And what is Ubuntu like as far as using system resources? I can't imagine it uses anywhere near as much as XP.
 

nikolokolus

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Ubuntu is quite good actually (with respect to responsiveness, speed, etc.) . . . it also can depend on the graphical front end that you use.

Gnome and KDE can be kind of memory hogs at times, I personally favor XFCE, but that's only because I needed a small memory footprint for my fileserver that only has 256 MB of PC-133 memory :p

With 768MB of RAM though you should do just fine with either Ubuntu (gnome version) or Kubuntu (KDE version).

Hell, Ubuntu will even ship you free, professionally printed CD's if you don't mind waiting for a month.
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40GB will be more than enough storage I would think.
 

cxl

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Yeah, I was looking at Ubuntu. That's probably what I'll go with. And the ATI driver support was one of the main things I was worried about. Most of the stuff I'll be programming will be school assignments, so nothing to big. I do dabble in some game development though. I'm thinking 40GB should be enough? And what is Ubuntu like as far as using system resources? I can't imagine it uses anywhere near as much as XP.

The only trouble is that with P4@2Ghz, you will wait for ages until GCC compiles anything larger.... AMD CPUs (and presumably new Core2) are much better at this discipline.

Mirek
 

mrd

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Gary_Busey: Will everything I have work fine with Linux?

If you want 3D acceleration, the Radeon 9600 will require either ATI's proprietary drivers (included in Ubuntu's xorg-driver-fglrx package) or the reverse-engineered driver from r300.sf.net.