Linux used to be the OS for low-spec machines....

[drag]

Depends on how experianced you are with Linux.

If your experianced then install Debian Etch and at install time select 'desktop' role. It will install full gnome desktop and you can try that out if you like it.

If you don't then you can start exploring alternative lightweight environments until you find one you like.

Keep in mind that a modern desktop usually is going to have a panel or dock, a window manager, and a file manager.
So try out some window managers... Fluxbox, Icebox, and a few others.
http://xwinman.org/

Then try out some file managers. Rox-Filer is a good one to check out. Gentoo (the file manager, not distro) is nice to check out, pretty advanced. A combination that may be interesting would be Icewm + XFE, which would provide a approximent environment to Windows 98.
http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/02/23/2226202&tid=13&tid=49

One that I checked out lately that was very interesting is Rox-desktop. Based around the rox-filer. It's a complete drag-n-drop interface. Designed to be similar to the 'RiscOS' desktop.
http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/node/86


if your not a experianced Linux user then check pre-made linux desktops for lightweight environment.
Puppy Linux - http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=1
Vector Linux - http://vectorlinux.com/
DSL - http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ (they have guides to help you to gain compataibility with Debian software packages after you install DSL to your harddrive.)


Good luck.

 

[R64]

Thanks Drag. I have installed linux in the past and used it to some extent successfully on a P1 75Mhz, 8MB RAM machine. I know, I know, this was around 1996. Had Win, OS2(anyone remember that?), and linux on a 800MB HDD. Good times. I will try Debian with gnome. My univ has a mirror so, downloading should be a breeze.

 

[drag]

There is a guy that I work with that still uses OS/2 for his desktop.

 

[Zugzwang152]

That comp would do pretty decently with windows 2000.

 

[R64]

I have W2k on it right now and it is horribly slow. I could have simply reinstalled W2k, and still might end up doing that along with some form of linux. The netboot thing from Debian hangs my machine during boot, so I am trying kubuntu now. If the speed is acceptable, might stick to that.

 

[drag]

For Debian what netboot image did you use?

 

[R64]

I used my school's mirror. Both Etch and the older one (rel 4).
http://mirror.cc.vt.edu/pub/debian/dist...installer-i386/current/images/netboot/
http://mirror.cc.vt.edu/pub/debian/dist...installer-i386/current/images/netboot/

 

[R64]

I was not able to find a complete cd-iso from my school's mirror and am dowloading from USC. SLOW. I can usually hit 1 MBPS from my school.

 

[R64]

OK, it hangs on PC card services (92%). Any way to turn this off?

Ok, some googling and founf expert26 command. Stopped loading PC Card and install is going on. Thanks!

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Maybe go with fvwm? Yes it's a bit ugly, but it tends to be user friendly, lightweight, and quick. It isn't a monster like Gnome, but it's far from a minimalist solution like Blackbox or Fluxbox. Also, it's older than dirt so it shouldn't have too many problems.

That might help a bit, but not much since you'll most likely have at leaset half of the Gnome stuff in memory anyway since you'll want to use those apps. Metacity itself only uses ~8M RSS so replacing it won't change much.

Also, if you want the "best" possible performance, then it may be worthwhile to compile and install everything from source, that way all the features of the CPU will be used to their potential, rather then just default compiled i386 or i486 binaries. That probably won't make much of a difference here though, as the problem is almost without a doubt the amount of ram in that machine.

It won't make a noticable difference at all and would be a huge waste of time and some larger things like Xorg might not even compile with that little amount of memory.

it will if you also also add a 10" muffler to it.

 

[Seeruk]

Originally posted by: drag

I hear what ya saying.... i.e. the old machine with pirated windows on, that was exactly what I was attempting to replace. But although your inlaws use XFCE, I can honestly say I have had 30-40 example customers who have thrown it and similar back at me within 2 weeks and not one who didnt come back.

So your saying that people hired you to replace Windows with Linux on old machines and they all came back later to have you reinstall Windows?

Some specifically yes. Others just something else easier to use. Probably 4-5 of them are still on linux, though only after paying for some kind of hardware upgrade (memory in all cases if I remember rightly), others have gone for XP or Win2k

 

[drag]

Last year there was a 'desktop' get together of various companies (nokia, redhat, novell, etc) that were interested in desktop usability.

There was this company called Neoware. They turned their Windows desktops into Thinclients. Used a custom FVWM desktop with Firefox with XUL modifications to lock down. The idea is that they simply match the Windows interface as close as possible so that they don't have to retrain users.

They deployed 50,000 desktops for this retail outlet. Replaced Windows XP and W2k and it cost about 1/4 as much. Of course they couldn't replace all of them. There was many cases were Windows was not replacable at that time.

Mostly to do with places that had lots of printers or had specific DOS or Windows applications they depended on.

I just thought you might find that interesting. It all hinged around providing a familar interface to users. That thing is much more important for normal people then most other things. Of course this was also professional setup rather then somebody's home desktop, which is a lot more difficult.

I know building a Linux system for others can be tough. That's why I like using Debian since it's easy to customize, then it's easy for people to keep fairly up to date and secure (which I see as a big problem for most distros like Ubuntu or Fedora as they tend to break random crap between updates)

It's obvious that there is still work to be done before Linux becomes very usefull for average people. (usefull enough to justify getting people to think about replacing Windows.)

 

[skyking]

What is your time worth? You installed 4 OS's that had to take a while.
Get another 128 Mb of ram and run whatever you want. It is the watershed amount of ram for xp or any other....
At 128 life sucks, with any UI.
256 and life is bearable.

 

[sciencewhiz]

A linux distro from 2002 will run better then Windows XP
A linux distro from 2006 will run better then Windows Vista
A linux distro from 2006 will not run better then Windows XP

 

[drag]

Depends on your expectations.

I got Debian to happily run with no modifications (besides removing optional packages) or deleting files or anything like with only about 15 megs of RAM used.

 

[TanisHalfElven]

i ran ubuntu 5.10 for a whole yeah (firefox, azureus, encoding, watching movies , you name it) on a sempron 2400+ with 128 mb . i think your PROBLEM MAY JUST BE LACK OF HARDWARE ACCELERATION for video

 

[IEC]

I can get Windows XP to load up using less than 60MB RAM.
I can also get most linux distros to load up using less than 60MB of RAM.

It's all in the configuration and uninstalling/disabling all unneccessary services/packages.

 

[htne]

Originally posted by: ariafrost
I can get Windows XP to load up using less than 60MB RAM.
I can also get most linux distros to load up using less than 60MB of RAM.

It's all in the configuration and uninstalling/disabling all unneccessary services/packages.

I wouldn't know whether the above statement is true. Not being a masochist, I have never tried to run a modern OS in less than 64 megs of memory. I mean, what's the point? I see people throwing away computers everyday with more memory than that.

Seriously, I repair computers for other people as a bit of a sideline/hobby/non-official-business. Many people, who know I do this, offer me their old computers when they upgrade. I used to always pull the memory / hard drive / floppy / optical drives. Recently, when cleaning the garage, I threw away more than 50 old cdrom drives, maybe a dozen CDRW (8x, 16x, etc), maybe 30 or 40 hard drives (from 1 to 4 gigs), and some unknown number of memory sticks. I kept no memory sticks less than 64 megs, and I probably have somewhere between 50 and 100 of the 64 meggers. I don't think they're worth testing, and the only reason I kept them is that they take up so little space. BFI runs the city dump here in the small town where I live, and they have a huge recycling bin just for metal. I hauled two pickup truck loads of old computers and computer parts to the dump and finished filling up their metal recycling bin. And I saw a LOT of old computers in the bin before I started dumping mine.

If you have an old computer with 64 megs that you are trying to use, look around -- ask some of your friends, relatives, neighbors, enemies, strangers on the street... I'll bet you can easily get a half-dozen better computers given to you in less than an hour.

 

[halw]

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Insta...f5663adabcf5cb466de390ac754d444a05b0a4">Here</a> is a link to installing K/Ubuntu on low memory systems.

I recently finishes and install on a laptop with 192 MB using Kubuntu alternate cd server install w/Icewm and it works great.

 

[cheesehead]

I would reccomend using XFCE. Much more memory efficient than KDE, and it's pretty easy to use. I'm using it on my Pentium III machine, and it runs very fast indeed.

If you need some more RAM, I could sell you some at a reasonable price.

 

[Noema]

I'm posting this using Xubuntu 6.10 on a P4 1.4GHz 128MB RAM and a 16MB TNT2 Nvidia card. It runs well, using about 70MB of RAM with FF (3 tabs) and GAIM open. Barely hitting Swap at about 15MBs.

The biggest problem however is not so much RAM but rather CPU muscle. The processor is often maxed out in many tasks, making the machine very sluggish until usage drops down from 100%.

 

[cheesehead]

Originally posted by: Noema
I'm posting this using Xubuntu 6.10 on a P4 1.4GHz 128MB RAM and a 16MB TNT2 Nvidia card. It runs well, using about 70MB of RAM with FF (3 tabs) and GAIM open. Barely hitting Swap at about 15MBs.

The biggest problem however is not so much RAM but rather CPU muscle. The processor is often maxed out in many tasks, making the machine very sluggish until usage drops down from 100%.

Yeah, that's always bugged me too. Why the heck does Synaptic eat up so many CPU cycles?

I'm very tempted to abandon Ubuntu/Mepis in favor of a lighter distro. I'm learning the command line anyhow, and I'm rather peeved that so many things run so poorly.