Re: What Linux distro to use for old Intel machine, that fits on CDs?

On Sun, 29 Jun 2008 07:59:43 -0700, raylopez99 wrote:

On Jun 29, 3:40 pm, Douglas Mayne <d...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I downloaded Vector--and found out after 3 hours of download that it
needs a 2.3 GB HD, which might be bigger than the 2 GB I have now (I'll
have to check).

Final question to all: what exactly am I getting with Linux, assuming i
can install it, that I don't already have in Windows 2000 on this old
machine? Everybody agrees the hardware will be slow. So, the only
thing I can figure is that with Linux I don't need the bloatware
antivirus program I'm using now (and one reason I want to switch from
Win2000, since this antivirus program slows down this old machine too
much).

Am I correct?

Thanks in advance.

Also as a bonus how often Linux will crash--which will be upsetting with
this noob--would be helpful.

RL

If you are asking if moving from Win2K to Linux is going to change your
life, it won't. As you've already figured out, the big advantage to you is
that Linux is malware free. Linux comes with a huge amount of free
software right out of the box, however on the system that you are planning
to use it on this isn't going to help you. Open Office (which you could
run on your Win2K box also) is a little nicer than MSOffice, however it's
actually significantly slower than MSOffice. On modern hardware the
difference isn't noticeable but on a 200MHz box it will probably be pretty
painful. There are lightweight applications like Gnumeric and Abiword that
will be much faster but they aren't nearly as full featured. Evolution is
a terrific e-mail client, it's as least as good as anything on Windows,
and like all Linux apps you won't have to worry about viruses. However if
you are using Outlook now you won't see a lot of differences between
Evolution and Outlook. Linux also comes with a lot of server applications,
however you probably aren't interested in those.

The Gnome Desktop in it's current incarnation is a lot nicer than anything
on Windows, it's certainly light years ahead of Win2K. It's uncluttered as
compared to Windows and lot's more things happen automatically. However
Desktops don't really matter, they have no effect on your productivity.
The one big advantage of Linux desktops is that you can have lots of them,
once you've used multiple desktops you won't understand how you could have
lived without them.

Linux also networks with other machines a lot more naturally. SSH is
installed by default on Linux systems so you can run things on other boxes
just as easily as you can on your local box. On Windows you could install
Cygwin which would allow you to access Linux boxes in the same way but
there is no Windows to Windows equivalent. Rdesktop in XP allows you to
take over another XP box but it only allows one user at a time and it
brings up a whole desktop instead of just the application that you want to
run. BTW Linux has an Rdesktop client so you can access XP boxes this way
if you need to use it.

Win2K was very lightweight as compared to any modern OS including Linux.
While Linux can be stripped down so that it will run on very weak
machines, the process of doing that gives up most of the refinements that
have been added to Linux in recent years.

The bottom line is that you should try a modern full featured distro like
Fedora 9 or Ubuntu 8.0.4 (both of which have live CDs) to see what Linux
looks like. If you are impressed then you should put it on some modern
hardware. I've tried the Via based box and it's fairly decent. However a
quick check on Pricewatch showed that there are actually a fair number of
Athlon 64 X2 boxes that are available for the same money, just search
under PC -NO OS. If you get a new box make sure that you get 2G of RAM,
it's cheap and it will make a huge difference. Any modern CPU will be more
than fast enough so you could cut corners there.
.

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