KaiGywer From United States of America, joined Oct 2003, 12022 posts, RR: 43 Posted (7 years 2 months 1 week 6 days 17 hours ago) and read 647 times:
Hey there. I have an older computer that I'm not using. I want to install Linux on it, just to try it out. It is a P3 450 Mhz, with 192 Mb RAM and 6.5Gb HDD. Would this be good enough to run Linux?
Also, I tried installing Red Hat a long time ago, but could never figure it out. Are there any other versions that are more "Windows-user friendly"?
Go3Team From United States of America, joined Mar 2004, 3266 posts, RR: 22 Reply 1, posted (7 years 2 months 1 week 6 days 15 hours ago) and read 631 times:
That computer should be good enough to run Linux. I have run it on slower computers with success. IMO Red Hat is one of the easiest flavors to use, with the graphical interface of course. Good Luck.
Hawaiian717 From United States of America, joined May 1999, 3089 posts, RR: 9 Reply 2, posted (7 years 2 months 1 week 6 days 4 hours ago) and read 621 times:
What's called Red Hat these days costs money, however they support a free version that is essentially the development wing for Red Hat, called Fedora. The installer is pretty easy, it works much like Windows. A graphical installer that you just point and click. I haven't tried Ubuntu, but hear some good things about it being easy to work with, so that might be worth looking into as well.
Traveler_7 From Estonia, joined May 2000, 540 posts, RR: 0 Reply 3, posted (7 years 2 months 1 week 5 days 22 hours ago) and read 606 times:
I used SUSE and think that it is quite "Win-user friendly".
Also Mandriva suppose to be quite easy to use, configure and install, but never tried myself.
MD11Engineer From Germany, joined Oct 2003, 13333 posts, RR: 64 Reply 4, posted (7 years 2 months 1 week 5 days 21 hours ago) and read 599 times:
I use SuSe Linux with KDE as a GUI on a 5 year old machine with an AMD Duron processor comparable to a P3 (don't ask me for the frequency) and 40 Gb HDD. The only thing I did was to boost the RAM to about 400 MB (the more the better), the computer works fine with it.
SuSe Linux comes with an installer and system control program called YAST, which does most of the configurations on installation and update. It's user interface is largely intuitive and can be set to support many languages.
KaiGywer From United States of America, joined Oct 2003, 12022 posts, RR: 43 Reply 5, posted (7 years 2 months 1 week 5 days 19 hours ago) and read 585 times:
And since Linux is free, I can download this, right? Any good and fast sites?
Jush From Germany, joined Apr 2005, 1636 posts, RR: 4 Reply 6, posted (7 years 2 months 1 week 5 days 19 hours ago) and read 585 times:
Well the newer Linux distributions are almost as easy to install as Windows releases. But I'm not so sure wheter you can run Linux on that configuration.
Regds
jush
There is one problem with airbus. Though their products are engineering marvels they lack passion, completely.
KaiGywer From United States of America, joined Oct 2003, 12022 posts, RR: 43 Reply 8, posted (7 years 2 months 1 week 5 days 14 hours ago) and read 564 times:
Quoting Traveler_7 (Reply 7): In some case you can download live iso images burn it on CD or DVD and first play and see if your hardware functions well.
Also you can download full installation CD or DVD usually links to the mirrors a provided in the site of distribution.
Many distributions could be installed on-line in this case you just have to prepare boot CD and find mirror site which is close to you
Seanp11 From United States of America, joined Jan 2006, 290 posts, RR: 0 Reply 11, posted (7 years 2 months 1 week 5 days 11 hours ago) and read 554 times:
My brother is an advocate of Gentoo. He uses it on his laptop.
I have heard that Kunbutu is very easy for the non Linux user.
I use Fedora Core on P4 workstations at school.
I recommend you go shopping and see what distro works best for you.
Hawaiian717 From United States of America, joined May 1999, 3089 posts, RR: 9 Reply 13, posted (7 years 2 months 1 week 5 days 5 hours ago) and read 540 times:
Quoting Seanp11 (Reply 11): My brother is an advocate of Gentoo. He uses it on his laptop.
Gentoo is my first choice for myself, but I don't recommend it to someone unless they're interested and willing to spend a bit of time getting to know it. The new installer probably makes things a lot easier, but it would still probably prove daunting to someone new to Linux.
Plus, this is going onto older hardware, which most people might not like with Gentoo. Gentoo doesn't install binary packages; by default everything is downloaded and compiled from source. While it's an automated process that works extremely well, it does take time. On old hardware (like the 10 year old machine that I run my web site on), a lot of time.
Stas From Poland, joined Mar 2008, 0 posts, RR: 0 Reply 14, posted (7 years 2 months 1 week 5 days 4 hours ago) and read 536 times:
I suggest Ubuntu for any person who would like to learn Linux. I find Ubuntu the friendliest distribution which is perfect for both a newbie and a professional user. You could get it for free at www.ubuntu.com. Also, check out www.distrowatch.com where you can find reviews of various distributions.
Saxdiva From United States of America, joined Jun 2004, 2382 posts, RR: 47 Reply 16, posted (7 years 2 months 1 week 5 days 2 hours ago) and read 530 times:
Another distribution with a reputation for being friendly is Mandrake. My personal experience with it was that it wasn't *quite* as easy to deal with as I had hoped--it seemed to be a bit on the buggy side when I last used it. But others have had better luck, I guess.
On the other hand, I've run Fedora (Red Hat's community-supported distribution) on two different machines, and found installation and updates on that to be very simple. Just make sure you've got a pretty good idea of what hardware you've got installed, in case you need to track down a rogue driver or something.
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