View Full Version : Which distro?
sickofusernames
17-07-2008, 4:08 PM
Hi, I'm temporarily donating back my sisters old desktop (i'm talking really old!) and I need to get it up and running with an OS, it's a 1Ghz AMD with a 20Gig HD and about 256MB of ram so want a small installation if poss.
Any recommendations? - I do have the book "Linux Bible" (with a lot of distros on a DVD) I bought ages ago but I don't know which one would be the best to install but failing that I may have to download it so it really needs to be quite a small distro.
TIA., stu
Hi, I'm temporarily donating back my sisters old desktop (i'm talking really old!) and I need to get it up and running with an OS, it's a 1Ghz AMD with a 20Gig HD and about 256MB of ram so want a small installation if poss.
Any recommendations? - I do have the book "Linux Bible" (with a lot of distros on a DVD) I bought ages ago but I don't know which one would be the best to install but failing that I may have to download it so it really needs to be quite a small distro.
TIA., stu
Check the sticky (http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=731335)
scotty38
18-07-2008, 8:17 AM
I don't use it myself, had a quick play once, but this would fit the bill I think.....
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=puppy
TOMMOHAWK_UK
20-07-2008, 10:36 AM
To be honest, any of the modern distros should work fine with an older PC. I would always recommend trying Ubuntu 8.04 as your starting point because it offers the best hardware detection and support. Failing that, I would go for a distro that uses a lightweight desktop manager such as XFCE so in that case you would want to use the XFCE variant of ubuntu which is Xubuntu. This uses the least amount of RAM of any of the mainstream desktop managers and has a minimal install which lets you then install only the packages you need to use. It looks quite bare when you boot it up but that is the beauty of it, it lets you customise it the way you want it.
See the link here http://www.xubuntu.org/
Ken
sickofusernames
23-07-2008, 11:40 PM
See the link here http://www.xubuntu.org/
Ken
Cool thanks, might give that a go soon although my download limit is almost maxxed out this month!
I tried puppylinux (or pcPuppy OS) last week as scotty38 said but I think there may be an issue with my sisters CD drive, it's very temperamental. Once booting the puppy OS live cd i found somewhere in the forum that mentioned I could do the full hard drive install when booted into ram, but that failed miserably anyway as the proc is a 1gig and i've hardly got any ram to play with - I guess that, along with the dodgy CD drive was the problem?
Anyway, I like linux/unix as a user but it's too finikitybolox when it comes to different versions/flavours/platforms whatever - hoorah for windows, hehe :eek: (maybe i'm just getting too old?)