Should I install Linux and if so what version?
Don M
Posts: 1,652
I have an older HP computer sitting around and it needs a hard drive as the original one died. I'm trying to decide what to do with this box- whether to buy a drive and install Linux or just scrap it out. I don't have any experience with Linux so I thought I'd ask the general forum here for some suggestions.
Here's the specs on the HP:
Pentium 4 3.20GHz
2 GB Ram
ATI 2400 Pro AGP Dual DVI video card
RS232 & Parallel port
4 USB 2.0 ports
3 1/2 Floppy
2 DVD drives (1 Writer)
Don't know if it's worth messing around with. What say you?
Thanks.
Don
Here's the specs on the HP:
Pentium 4 3.20GHz
2 GB Ram
ATI 2400 Pro AGP Dual DVI video card
RS232 & Parallel port
4 USB 2.0 ports
3 1/2 Floppy
2 DVD drives (1 Writer)
Don't know if it's worth messing around with. What say you?
Thanks.
Don
Comments
It is well worth messing around with Linux.
Edit: What? You have a machine with real serial and parallel ports and you want to scrap it! No waayyyy...
Other edit: Just noticed you don't have a hard drive. Just for fun burn a Knoppix live CD image onto a CD or DVD and boot that up. Then you can see Linux running. Dead easy, no installation required. Such live CD's are often handy for repair work.
My home machine is an old single core AMD 64 bit something it is hardly distinguishable, performance wise, from the much newer Intel Quad core wiz bang on my desk in the office.
Stick an SSD in there and have fun with it.
I really have no specific plans. I mostly dabble in programming i.e. the Propeller. Just thought I'd learn more about Linux.
This machine was my main programming machine (Windows XP) until the hard drive quit. It was more than adequate at that time. I replaced it a couple years ago and it has been sitting around since. Been cleaning out the basement lately.
As far as hard drive replacement- it'll be the most inexpensive option that I find. I don't need a lot of storage but something for around $50 or less would be fine.
That need not be a "main concern" if you are exploring Linux for the first time.
I understand the budgetary constrains but 50 dollars more on an SSD makes life so much nicer. The best up-grade I have had to any machine ever.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178450
500GB, almost as fast as an SSD
I have Xubuntu http://xubuntu.org/ installed on a computer even older than this one and works like a charm
I was playing around with Ubuntu on a older machine than yours, and the standard desktop that Ubuntu installed brought it to its knees; it felt so sluggish it was painful.
Then I tried Lubuntu, a version with a lightweight desktop. It was much faster but the desktop was a little too lightweight, without much in the way of features.
I went back to Ubuntu and played around with configuring desktops for a while, and eventually got a pretty good mix of useful features which still ran pretty quickly on quite an old machine.
So your machine would be more than adequate.
I don't know about you, but I find surplus hard drives around all the time in giveaway pcs, many of decent size and with years of life left in them. They may not be the biggest or the fastest, but if you can find one, it could be an easy way to get started with Linux and get a feel for whether this is something you'd want to invest more time and money into.
Seems Canonical take Debian and break it in interesting ways in the name of creating a more attractive user experience.
The KDE Plasma Desktop is just fine on Debian. I must admit however that I do turn off most of the eye candy, fade this, animate that, nonsense. Also KDE used to start up some file system search service that would suck all your performance away for hours at a time as it was indexing all your files. That was the first thing to turn off but it does not seem to be such a problem now days.
Oh, and I found that installing the Chrome browser from the Debian repos screwed up posting to this forum for some odd reason so it's better to install Chrome form a download from Google.
Gnome is, well, just awful
Try out the LiveCD in demo mode to see what the computer's look and feel will be. And don't become too worried about making your first Linux install being perfect for you. It is easy to change to another distribution later if you take the time to have 3 partitions -- / or Root partition, /home or Home partition, and /swap or Swap partition. By having that separate /home partition, all your data can remain untouched if you want to switch from one distro of Linux to another.
I suspect you will be pleased with how well Linux performs on a machine that might bog down in Windows. The /swap partition improves performance by acting a additional virtual RAM.
It makes it seem that your machine has a lot more RAM than it actually has. By, well, swapping memory blocks for disk blocks.
On the one hand if your programs need to use swap that will decrease performance by orders of magnitude. Not good.
On the other hand it may allow programs to actually run that would otherwise be killed off with an out of memory error. In which case they are running infinitely faster with swap that without!
For me, as soon as I see swap space is required it's time to get more RAM.
Ditto to the Xubuntu advice. Running that on a old dual celeron small form factor pc. Serves as a media center mame machine. That OS works a treat.
The original was a SATA drive.
I do plan to try what my friend calls "vanilla" which is the Debian/KDE load. He uses it almost exclusively and swears by it, but he has been a Linux Guru for years. I don't know how much of his tweaking on installs is required and how much is because he knows what he is doing to make systems purr like a kitten.
So I have 2 different options to make a DVD or CD. Either on my MAC or a Windows XP machine. Can someone point me to where I need to go to get this done?
Thanks.
The file I'm downloading is this: xubuntu-14.04-desktop-i386.iso 16-Apr-2014 13:47 899M
Is this the correct one to try it live on DVD first?
David- As I mentioned earlier in this thread- my original hard drive was SATA. I installed a SATA drive tonight. I was also able to make a live DVD for Xubuntu and it works! The new drive shows up and I'm able to read files from it. Now I need to learn how to format the drive in Linux and install the OS.
The installation program for the linux distribution will partition and format the drive for you. Boot offof the dvd and let it rip!
I found that out when I went through the installation. Up and running now.
Yay, well done!
You will now be lost in a life long study of the ocean of Free and open Source Software.
So you went with Xubuntu? How is your experience so far?
Fred- so far it works fine. I only chose to install Xubuntu because it was the quickest to download an image for live dvd. The next day I was finally able to download Debian / KDE (for some reason it was really slow) and made a live dvd of that also. I have tried it too but not as much. Both seemed to work fine for all the more that I have used either.
I don't know what to really test to determine which one may be better than the other. Along with my inexperience with Linux that only adds to it. Both of them where able to find all the hardware and make it work.
First order of the day is to fire up a console window and get familiar with the command line. You need to know the everyday commands: ls, cd, cp, mkdir, rmdir, rm, pwd, sudo, whoami, more, less, cat, touch, tar, zip, gzip, gunzip, ln, mount, unmount, wget, curl, ssh, etc etc. And of course "man", the manual pages. Just type "man ls" for instructions on ls. Or "man man" if you want to know how man works:)
Of course if you have a browser open typing "man ls" into the search box quickly gets what you want to know.
Don't forget that a Unix command line "shell" has auto completion for file names so hitting TAB after typing part of a file name will often complete it correctly. If there are more than one possible files with that name prefix another TAB will list the options. Cursor up down will scroll back thought your recent commands if you want to do them again. "history" will show a list of all the command you have used recently. All in all the Unix shell is a lot more luxurious than the old DOS command line you may be used to.
For extra geek cred you need to get to grips with an editor vim or emacs.
As for that "best" thing. Eventually whatever distro you are using will annoy you somehow and you will try another, and an other. Everyone goes through that. Ultimately end up with Debian:)
With that under your belt it will be time to install SimpleIDE and PropellerIDE so you can work with your Props from there.
A few versions ago I read that Linux Mint was the most downloaded that month. The MATE desktop exactly suited me, coming from windows xp. That's is, it makes the same sense like xp, but isn't broken or crappy. And the install drives itself, not stupid screwing with GRUB or kernel up/down/sideways-grade, etc. I would recommend Mint MATE 14.04, it is built on debian like ubuntu, except Mint MATE is not broken with unity or gnome. I have Mint on all my rigs nows, from the pentium 4 to the i7. Incidentally, gnome was my fav until they started messing it up a few versions ago, which is why Itried MATE in the first place. heater can correct me, but I ithnk Mint is like debian with reasonable options pre-configured for a new user. Which is nice, as I was always stumped from too many options when installing linux.