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Ubuntu On Older PC

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okb

Member
I have an older PC that we don't really use for much other than web browsing (well my wife does, I hardly use it now). Will Ubuntu install on it or is it too slow/old? I think all my hardware should work, with the exception of maybe the video card--I couldn't locate it on hardware lists, it's a blazing fast ATI Rage II 8meg AGP card woo!
 
Ubuntu will install, but from my own experience running Ubuntu on a PII-300 I can tell you that RAM is king. If you're going to use the default Gnome WM, you need 128MB. 64MB is painfully slow, 256MB much better. Your Rage II will work also.
 
My bad, neglected to mention I have 512MB in there. She may be old, but she leads as good a life as I can provide. 😉 Will it be as painfully slow as W2K? It's essentially going to be used for web browsing, and data storage for sharing files/music etc with my laptop.
 
I think you will find it to be snappy.

If it does seem a little laggy, you might look at switching to a lighter gui. Linux has a ton of choices for gui's and firefox will run from inside any of them. But I bet you will be just fine.
 
Great, it can't be any slower than Windows right? 😉 Thanks for the replies, have some Ubuntu disks on the way, should give me a good distraction from school work. 🙂
 
There is an excellent guide over on the Ubuntu Forums (look under the How-To subforum) that discusses doing a minimum install of Ubuntu with only the apps you want and a lighter GUI of your choice. I've done a minimal installation with XFCE and it runs pretty dang good on older hardware.
 
SleepWalker, heh you're right it would but why waste all my hardware g00dness? 🙂

Thanks Blue. Been poking my nose in there a bit today, though I keep getting sidetracked. Seeing as it won't be a power user computer or anything a lighter GUI might be nice. Though how the wife takes to it....😉 I have a bad habit of commandeering the computers for "projects" lol.
 
I run xfce4 on gentoo and can surf the web + some email without hitting the swap at all. It might take a while to boot, but I don't reboot except every few months or a power outage 😉
 
Well I'm not worried about disk space or memory, basically just raw power, though more memory-intensive things usually mean more crunching.

Btw, I've got three HDDs in that PC, and they're NTFS is that going to cause problems?
 
Originally posted by: okb
Well I'm not worried about disk space or memory, basically just raw power, though more memory-intensive things usually mean more crunching.

Btw, I've got three HDDs in that PC, and they're NTFS is that going to cause problems?
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Reading data from NTFS in Linux isn't a problem, but writing to NTFS partitions is still unreliable. I wouldn't count on it.
 
Ouch. Hmm, ok looks like I'll be doing lots of backing up. 🙂 Just as well, I've collected a lot of garbage that never seems to get tossed! Been a while since I've genuinely looked forward to a computer project.
 
XFCE is fast and has good features (you won't stray too much from a desktop environment like KDE or Gnome)... I'd probably try that first. Fluxbox is even faster but VERY minimal. Just dedicate one of your hard drives (about 10gb would be enough) to linux. Keep any data files like music, pictures, images on NTFS drives, it can still read everything, but if you need writing from Windows and Linux boxes (say you had some coding that was done on both), create a small FAT32 partition which Linux can write to.
 
Minimal is good. I hate having lots of fluffy crap even on beefier systems. The only 'luxury' I allow myself is a nice wallpaper image. 🙂 Thanks, I'll check all these out. Probably install Ubuntu vanilla first to get my feet wet, then try some of this stuff out.

As for partitioning, I'll likely wipe the main disk (I think it's 30Gig, been a while since I've had to know). Is it a good idea to have a smaller partition, say the 10 gigs you mentioned, for the OS and another for whatever?
 
You are encouraged to partition with Linux. It depends on your needs, but for a strictly surfing/work PC on that size hard drive I would suggest 5-10GB for /, 512MB for swp and the balance given to /home. Further partitioning isn't really necessary for desktop use. Some servers isolate parts of the filesystem as partitions for various reasons but for your purposes you will do fine with separate root and home partitions. The other advantage is that with separate root and home partitions, you can reinstall Ubuntu without losing data (and I guarantee that if you like to mess around, you will eventually break it so badly that you will just reinstall, although Linux is generally repairable from almost any state to a guru) and also try out multiple distros and share the home between them.

For an analogy: / is like C:\, /home is like My Documents. Kinda.

XFCE is cool. Snappy, too. Windows does feel faster than KDE or Gnome, it has to be said.
 
That's similar to how I usually set up Windows (separate place to install things/hoard files). Good to know it's resistant to abuse, I do like to mess around with things a bit, though I'm nowhere near proficient (certainly not anymore) and a total n00b to Linux.

Ubuntu is different from KDE/Gnome right? Kubuntu is the KDE version if i remember correctly? Lot of stuff to wade through and get straight heh. I'd like it to be a little less sluggish than Windows but this instal has been up for quite a while now so anything's likely better.

I did some reading up on XFCE and it does look very nice. Do you mean have multiple distros installed at the same time?
 
Ubuntu is a distro. Gnome and KDE are window managers. Ubuntu uses Gnome as the default window manager, but Kubuntu uses KDE. Either can be configured to use other WM's such as Blackbox, Enlightenment, XFCE etc.

I'd like it to be a little less sluggish than Windows
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Don't expect that. The only distro I have seen that got close to Windows responsiveness was Yoper. You can get a pretty fast distro by running one of the more minimalist WM's, but then you are also losing a fair bit of functionality.

Do you mean have multiple distros installed at the same time?
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Um, well, you can have multiple distros and multiple WM's installed at the same time. Within an installation you can set up as many WM's as you like, and you can dual-boot several installations.

Linux itself is a command-line OS, like MS-DOS. You use it with a shell like bash. X-Windows sits on top of Linux and gives you a graphical interface for the shell. The Window Manager runs sits on top of X-Windows and provides all the stuff like toolbars and wallpaper. It can be useful to remember at times that when using Gnome or KDE, all you are actually seeing is an abstraction and interpretation of a command-line. All the graphical-based configuration programs are basically just editing a dotfile (a text configuration file, kinda like the registry except there's one or more for each program rather than one for the whole system) somewhere and if you loaded that dotfile (so called because Linux system files often begin with a period, like ".conf", to hide them) in a text editor you could duplicate any effect.

See http://tldp.org/ for more info. Lots and lots of information there.
 
Aaah ok that makes loads of sense now. Kind of like the old 3.1 days, though nothing so crude lol. 😉 More like operating environments than systems?

Don't expect that. The only distro I have seen that got close to Windows responsiveness was Yoper. You can get a pretty fast distro by running one of the more minimalist WM's, but then you are also losing a fair bit of functionality
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Heh, you've never seen Windows run on my PC. 😀 It's been on there so long and has had so many things put on and taken off that it's needed a good format for quite some time. A lot longer than I like to let Windows age, and it's definitely not a fine wine.
 
More like operating environments than systems?
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Sort of. In Windows you have the exact same thing, but MS is careful to hide it from you. For instance, Windows 95 was the window system that was a front-end for MS-DOS, and the window manager was Explorer (if it was Explorer, I don't know if it was called that before they integrated the browser). In Linux it all hangs out there. 🙂

Heh, you've never seen Windows run on my PC.
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I sort of meant oranges to oranges. A fresh install of Windows will be more responsive than a fresh install of KDE or Gnome on the same system.

You could also try downloading the Ubuntu live CD. You can boot the complete OS off a CD-ROM and try it out without touching your hard drive. Worth considering if you just want to try Linux out.
 
Heh yeah I know what you meant. Not too worried about that, we're well used to a slow system. Looking more for something new and I've thought about doing this for way too long.

I thought about doing that, but decided against for a couple of reasons. One, I'd like to go through a full install on my PC and have full functionality. And the other is my dl's are capped to 1G/mo (soon to change) which sucks you-know-what. We always go over, but it gets expensive if we're not careful.
 
A Live CD is fully functional. Having one is good to test out a system you think might be faulty. But I appreciate what you say.

Installation on Ubuntu is still text-only, but it's very easy. If you know your way around a computer, you can do it in your sleep.

And the other is my dl's are capped to 1G/mo
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Buddy, WTF? Kick that ISP to the curb, now! My ISP caps me at 15GB a month, but they never enforce it. I got a warning email once when I hit 100GB in a single month. Other than that they've never bothered me. Oh, and when you call to disconnect, let them know it's the cap that's the problem. ISP's need to hear this so that they can get the message that we don't like being capped.
 
I know it's functional, what I mean is I'd rather go through everything with installation.

Buddy, WTF? Kick that ISP to the curb, now! My ISP caps me at 15GB a month, but they never enforce it.
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Well, it's their cheap DSL plan with uber slow speeds (like x2 dial speeds) designed to lure people off of dial up. It's actually cheaper than dial so after the 3 month free dial up I switched to it to save money...well it didn't, but that was the plan. Upgrading to the full 3meg DSL, hopefully it'll be ready Monday. There's no dl limit with it. It's either this or Rogers, and I'm not a big Rogers fan (or some smaller ISP's, but I go with what I know and this is a good service despite the BS). Btw, it's Bell Sympatico, so it's the lesser of two evils I suppose.
 
At least Sympatico doesn't cap you. I'm outside of Rogers' catchment area, I have Cogeco, which has been just great - they don't enforce their caps in any way, it gets up to 500KBps on a good day, and it's been down twice in the last five years. And one of those times was my fault (I moved the modem to another outlet).
 
Considered Rogers at one point, but I think it was a little bit more and there was a cap (at like 20G, but it's more the principle of the matter). Plus I don't know how many Rogers users there are in my area, I'm in an apartment so it's a safe bet there's a few. I don't like the idea of sharing bandwidth, there's enough causes of slow speeds out there to be hampered by my neighbors. Rogers has a faster high-end, but it's out of my price range anyways so it's irrelevant. Used to work for Sympatico too, so I know a bit about the DSL and how it works. Good service, just don't buy any of their crappy products. Ugh.
 
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