Linux noob + old laptop = lots of questions

misterPK

misterPK

misterPK

Soldato
Joined
18 Apr 2007
Posts
3,736
Location
Probably in a river somewhere
I've got an old laptop that currently has windows ME on it. Its archaic specs are:

800 MHz Celeron
128 Mb Ram
6 Gb hard drive

As I'm off travelling with work, I don't really fancy taking my modern desktop system with me, so I was wondering if my old laptop could be reborn with a linux based operating system on it.

I know nothing about linux, I've always been more of a hardware guy than software, but sitting around in hotels for a month or two will give me plenty of time to learn. So if someone could point me in the right direction to start with i'd be really grateful.

Cheers,
PK!
 
I was wondering if my old laptop could be reborn with a linux based operating system on it
Click to expand...
Definitely.

If you have the time (and especially patience!!), I would recommend going for one of the more full on distributions - you will learn far more about the OS that way, but the learning curve is steeper than a nice friendly distro which you won't learn as much from. Saying that though - that approach has put lots of people off linux :-/

My preferences for low spec hardware is Arch. Although, it's not the most n00b friendly linux, it is a lot more friendly than the likes of Gentoo (which is also a great linux distro - but IMHO, not so great for older hardware because of the compiling times involved).

A lot of the guys on here use various versions of Ubuntu - which doesn't have as steep a learning curve as the two I've mentioned. If you go this route, try out xubuntu (ubuntu with XFCE4 desktop environment), which is pretty light, so would be good for your laptop.

p.s. I used to have a p3 650 MHz with 128 MB ram - Arch (fluxbow WM) flew on that :)

EDIT: Also - it doesn't really matter which distro to choose - it's really more a question of the desktop environment (DE) or window manager (WM). e.g. KDE or Gnome would be a baaaaaad choice for that laptop unless you threw in a pile more ram; whereas XFCE of fluxbox would make excellent choices - however, have substantially less features (esp. flux)
 
Last edited:
+1 for Arch, you will learn a lot more about linux than using a full blown distro like Ubuntu/Suse etc and it will run faster on minimal hardware because it's stipped down - but you'll also get more frustrated if you don't put the time into learning the basics.

it's really not that difficult to get going versus something like Gentoo, the Arch wiki is a great place to start ..pretty much every information you need is on there.

or like walls said if you want something easier but with a GUI built in you could try Xubuntu which will play better on your laptop than Ubuntu......d/l a few isos and play with them all would be my advice.
 
I'd recommend Xubuntu. I had it on a 400Mhz Pentium II I think, with 196Mb of RAM. Wasn't exactly nippy but XFCE makes for a nice lightweight WM.
You'd do well to steer clear of anything that uses KDE.
I think if you're a linux noob you'd be much better playing about with one of the more user-friendly distros, ie. (x)ubuntu or debian with XFCE/fluxbox. Once you're a bit more comfortable you could probably do an arch or even a gentoo install if you wanted.
 
An old laptop is ideal for Linux, your hardware will most likely be supported 'out of the box' and, as you already know, most distros require a lot less muscle than Windows to run. :)
 
Just be aware your BIOS might not be supported if its before 2000.

I'm getting that error on an old TINY machine that had win98 on it. wont even boot into the live environment.
 
Try a few live CD's see how the old laptop copes, Ubuntu and Mandriva One are easy to get going this way.

If not give Puppy a try, I ve had it running on a 400mhz machine with 64MB Ram running from a 512MB flash drive.
 
just as a warning, a lot of live cd's will be diabolically slow if you try to run them on only 128MB of ram. I'd recommend the alternate xubuntu install (text mode installer like the xp partitioner) to get it going on a low ram system.
 
Another vote for Arch, only install what you need rather than the relative bloat of Ubuntu and such. A LiveCD will not reflect the true speed either.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom