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Hey Guys
after recently going round a computer fair i thound this old tower its specs are P3 128 Mhz, 256MB ram,21GB HDD. it cam with win 2000 installed on it but fter wiping the partition I was thinking what should i do with it? then Linux popped into my head "A free OS" is that true? also will it run on this particular machine if so I am tempted to install it and see how I like it. So what I really am rying to say will it run and should I ditch windows and mac and go to linux lol.any help welcome.....
There are literally over 100 versions of Linux, which one are you considering? 256MB RAM will hold you back but you should be able to find something that'll work. Most versions (aka Distros) are available as a live CD, which means that you simply boot off the CD & run Linux directly from the CD without actually installing it to the HDD. Once you find a distro that you like, then you can try installing it & running from the HDD.
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First of all, there is no such thing as a 128 MHz Pentium III. The lowest clocked P3 is the 450 MHz Katmai.
Yes, Linux is completely free to download, and it can be bought on CD's. If you download it, use a free program like ImgBurn to burn the ISO to a CD.
Here is your dilema: Linux isn't one OS. There is a countless amount of different "distros" (types) of Linux.
The most popular distros are Ubuntu and Mepis. A P3 should be sufficient to run these particular distros, but they want quite a lot more than 256 MB of RAM. But nonetheless, they should run if you wish to try them.
As for distros that are light on RAM, there are Puppy Linux and Red Hat Linux.
Those are all of the distros I can think of, but there are many more.
Certain distros will take some time to learn.
Linux will not run Windows or Mac programs, so you will need to google for Linux versions of your favorite programs to use. (I believe there are special Linux programs out there that let you run Windows programs, though.)
Certain Linux distros are nice looking and fun to play around with, but sometimes it just doesn't have the usefulness of Windows or Mac OS. If you're like me and many other people, you'll want to switch back to Windows or Mac OS eventually.
But, try it out, if you like!!
Hope this helps,
-Trent
"If at first you don't succeed, skydiving may not be for you."
-Our tour guide at Fenway Park in Boston, MA.
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Sorry, jam, i'm not to speedy at typing my follow-ups. :)
"If at first you don't succeed, skydiving may not be for you."
-Our tour guide at Fenway Park in Boston, MA.
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Itguru- after looking at some info about puppy linux im going to go for it. im a linux first timer lol can that boot off a live cd like "Jam" mentioned though?
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Well, it may not boot to cd as there is no cd support in bios.
Some cd-readers from that time also have issues with "burned" cd-r and even worse cd-rw's.
Live CD's are a great way if you can boot. They are much slower than running from hd. See lists of live cd's either at distrowatch or frozentech and other places.
Basically you download a CD image in iso format. Burn with an ISO burn tool. Use good quality CD's. Burn at slow speeds if you can. Might consider testing the iso image with md5checksums or when you boot to OS. You put the cd in the reader and boot to the cd.
Linux is basically only part of an operating system. What people do is offer what is termed distributions that offer tools and graphical tools/applications and other applications on a cd/dvd or few. You could build your own.
Not all linux is free. Not all linux distro's contain "free" software and code. You have to read and understand the difference.
There are also similar operating system disttro's that may suite your needs.
The P3 and the ram may be issues with the newest distros and window managers (gui's).
See DSL and Puppy, might get GOS to work.
I know I use 256m on VM's and many distros work but some with Live cd boot's may not have enought to run the live cd and install.
"Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10
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PuppyLinux has a Boot Floppy option:
http://www.puppylinux.com/cd-puppy.htm
"If you have an older PC that cannot boot from CD, there is a fall-back. This fall-back applies also to PCs that cannot boot from a USB drive. This is to use a boot floppy. Puppy has something especially for this situation, called WakePup, developed by Puppy enthusiast "pakt" -- look in the "Setup" menu and you will see an entry "WakePup create boot floppy". This will create a floppy disk that your PC can boot from. The WakePup floppy disk scans the PC and finds Puppy on a USB drive, hard drive, or CD/DVD drive."
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if you can boot off the cd, scroll down to the bottom 2 editions here:
http://www.linuxmint.com/download.phpI'm running the "regular" edition of mint 6, on a p3 with 384 0f ram. Runs well, can even watch dvds. I would try the Xfce edition. make the first partition a 1gig linux swap partition, should do this no matter which distro you choose.
If you do this, post back, I would be interest on how it runs on that machine.larry
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i may be a little late for this but...
for beginners i recommend Opensuse, a very easy version of linux
if you become an advanced user you could try feodra or mandrvia these offer mere features than opensuse
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
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the newest version of opensuse 11.?, with the kde 4 desktop, is not going the run well on a p3 with 256mb of ram. I'm running it on a XP2000, with a gig of ram and it is probably the least responsive distro I've used on this machine. The system monitor shows me using 400mb of ram soon after start-up, and running firefox. The distro is still "usable", and I think its the graphics card (64mb geforce mx400??), that is the problem. I have similar problems with any distro with the latest version of kde. If the poster is using "onboard graphics", I don't see any distro, with kde running well. the poster should try a distro with the xfce desktop, this may be a possibility:
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=04665larry
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i prefer GNOME desktop or XFCE with opensuse
and XFCE with fedora
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
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 can you install suse 11.1...
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view a log file start mid...
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