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morkus64

Diamond Member
Nov 7, 2004
3,302
1
81
Hey all, I just bought an older lappy on the forums here and when it gets here i want to install linux, but since i don't have much experience with it i was hoping for a bit of help.

I'm looking for a distro that's fairly easy to set up, has a good, easy to use graphical interface (preferably one that doesn't look like it was created in Paint or Dr. Halo (best program EVER)), and will run well on the old lappy. Once i'm done with my upgrades, these will be the specs:

NEC Versa 6220

200Mhz Pentium MMX (possibly 266 - is there anything special about this proc, or can i get a normal desktop chip and put it in? At what point did lappy only proccessors appear?)
128MB ram (man i wish it supported more)
6GB hd
20x Cd-rom

and other stuff that probably doesn't matter.

I've always leaned towards mandrake, but i don't know why... will it work?

Thanks all!
 
D

drag

Elite Member
Jul 4, 2002
8,708
0
0
You can try it. I think Mandrake is optimized for 686 and newer proccessors (pentium3), though.

Your main thing is that your going to have trouble with full-fledged desktop enviroments. With X Window (the Linux GUI) it's all very modular.

2 major Desktop enviroments are KDE and Gnome. They are feature-rich and bloated and you need a fairly fast computer to run them. About the same memory requirements as Windows 2000 and Windows XP. And memory is going to matter more then cpu speed at this point.

So what you want to shoot for is what is known as 'minimalist' window manager. Something that is going to offer the ability to handle window handling and probably a few menus or docks and not much else.

Options like that are Fluxbox, Blackbox, XFCE is closer to a desktop enviroment, Enlightenment 0.16, WindowMaker (like OpenSTEP), and quite a few other ones.

Using something like that will reduce the memory needs of your system by quite a bit. Althoug with 128megs you could probably get away with having a full desktop if you wanted one.

Slackware is a good one to look at. It's very.. minimalistic. It has a very steep learning curve sometimes, but it's simple enough that you can get the hang of it within a month or so.

Debian Testing or Sid is nice. Generally 'Stable' version is too old and crusty for you to use. That's what I use and you can keep it very small.. However with apt-get often you need to know the name of the item you want to install otherwise you can get lost. And since you'd probably be a newbie figuring out the names of programs you want can be very frustrating.

Other then that most any modern OS will work. Most of them give you a big KDE or Gnome desktop by default, but you can simply tell it you want to use something else. May take a bit to figure out how to do that though.

Try one, if you don't like it, reinstall with a different distro and try that out. It usually takes people quite a few different isntalls till they find something they like.
 
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notfred

Lifer
Feb 12, 2001
38,241
4
0
Linux desktops aren't magically faster than windows desktops. You get similar performance out of KDE and Windows XP graphical environments. You're going to have to pick something pretty basic to get decent performance on a 200mhz box.
 
M

morkus64

Diamond Member
Nov 7, 2004
3,302
1
81
hmm... we tried damn small linux, but it wouldn't go at 1024x768... also, ubuntu wouldn't go from the livecd... does that mean it probably wouldn't go smoothly from a full install?

 
Q

qbek

Member
Mar 12, 2005
110
0
0
Originally posted by: morkus64
hmm... we tried damn small linux, but it wouldn't go at 1024x768... also, ubuntu wouldn't go from the livecd... does that mean it probably wouldn't go smoothly from a full install?
Click to expand...

It might still be worth a try. LiveCDs are memory extensive (use RAMDrives) and 128MB is not much. That could be the bottleneck, I guess.

On the other hand, you might have hard time getting a full fledged 1024x768 desktop on a really old machine.
 
Nothinman

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
30,672
0
0
I thought you always recommend Debian and Debian alone
Click to expand...

Ubuntu is an easier start for some people, although the installer is virtually the same as the Debian sarge one many people try to install woody and get scared. And just about all of the work going into Ubuntu makes it back into Debian, so supporting either one is fine. The two major downsides to Ubutu, IMO, are:

1) Smaller set of supported packages. Debian Sid is over the 16,000 mark while Ubuntu ships 1/10th of that or less. Sure you can use the universe and multiverse repositories, but they don't get any QA so you're on your own.
2) Smaller set of supported architectures. I run Debian on x86, sparc64 and Alpha. Of those only x86 is supported by Ubtuntu.

with dsl, how would i get it to display properly if i actually did an install?
Click to expand...

You could edit /etc/X11/XF86Config-4, but X should pick the highest resolution that the video card and monitor say they support by default. It looks like DSL is based on Debian, so you could use debconf to reconfigure X, but X configuration is so simple these days that shouldn't be necessary.
 
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