I need Help

[spincricket]

My little cousin is running win98 on his computer. His family has 5 computers in their house which are all pretty speced out. Except for his. He is running on a P-II, with 128 Mb RAM. He cant boot into win98, because he is missing lmouse.vxd, if you guys recall its a stupid bug in win98. So i though, hell, why not install LInux on his machine. He doesnt do many intensive things, obviously with his computer. He is pretty excited about learning too.

So i think, I'm going to install a Server install of Ubuntu on his machine. But i have yet to decide what windowmanager. What do you guys reccomend?:speechles


he does have good HDD space, but im concered about the processor and the ram, thats why i want a slim install.

IM also worried of getting his internet working, i dont know what damn nic he has.

[seablade]

Hmm not real sure how well that Ubuntu will work for you, but try it and see I suppose. More concerned about performance, Win98 may beat out as it was designed for older computers, whereas even the never server stuff from Ubuntu is still designed for newer hardware. Just things to think about.

Seablade

[efalis]

Maybe you want to try out Zeta - there's a live CD image at http://download.freenet.de/archiv_z/zeta_live-cd_7560.html

Course, it's about $90 to buy it. But it's fast on old computers. It's not linux, but is definitely fun.

- ed

[spincricket]

You posit a good point seablade (as alwyas). Win98 is in fact meant for older computers. But just the sound of win 98 makes me cringe. Maybe i should just fix his lmouse.vxd issue. Or maybe, fix it, and dual boot linux, so he can at least try it. Hum, i wonder if that would put too much strain on the processor. But yea, i do suspect this computer has old hardware, his family doesnt want to give him one of the new ones, they think he'll break it if its in his room.

[seablade]

Dual booting wont put any strain on the processor that wouldnt already be there.

I think linux is a great choice for older computers, and do it all the time myself, just making you aware you may not want to get the newest flashiest thing out there as it may not run to well since the hardware cant support it very well. Instead going with slightly older stuff or custom compiling stuff for use with older hardware(Turning off the flashiness;) can be much better. In other words more work for the performance gains, but still useable.

You should check distrowatch as well as I believe there are several distros out there for this specific purpose.

Seablade

[abf]

as long as you have the ubuntu server installed, install xubuntu-desktop. its a tad buggy still, but no show-stopper. it will need some post install-config, but again nothing difficult. the advantage of xfce is that you still get all the benefits of gnome/gtk without the added fat.

[Starcub]

Get a hold of a live CD that has good hardware detection (like Knoppix). Boot it up and take note of the hardware it detects (print out the boot-up logs or lspci output). Now you should have all the info you'll need to streamline the linux kernel to run on that PC. Now get a barebones Linux distro like Gentoo, customize your kernel, and install only the packages you need. I've heard good things about fluxbox as a light window manager, but I use KDE myself -- it's resource heavy, but I run on a fast PC.

[seablade]

Starcub's method is probably the one I would do myself, the only catch is obviously it will take a while to compile things on that machine;)

Seablade

[spincricket]

yea, i had also thought of that. But i hadnt taken into consideration what seablade is saying, it will take a very long time to do that. :wow:

Ok, I'm going to his house on monday. I'll tell you what i end up doing.

Thanks, for the superb recommendations. :banana:

[mmarkin]

I was actually going to recommend Gentoo too. It would indeed take a relatively long time to compile things (you could do distcc for the initial install) but once the system is up and running, you can really do a good job in terms of minimalism. Minimal USE flags, lightweight desktop, stripped-down kernel, the works.

I have a P3 666MHz running Gentoo at home. I installed Gentoo on 128MB of RAM, and slipped in another 128MB once I started running Apache, MySQL, Samba, Cups, NFS, etc.

[attilathepun]

XFCE is a very light but functional window manager that's pretty intuitive and easy to use (at least I think it is). It has a much lighter memory footprint than KDE, which is definitely an issue with 128mb.

All else failing, :hitit: