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

On Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:46:31 -0700, raylopez99 wrote:

I don't know where you got the idea that download speeds are restricted of
you don't pay money, that's simply untrue. What is true is that different
mirror sites have very different performance. When you look at the mirror
lists you will see the total amount of bandwidth available for that
mirror. A few sites have 2G of bandwidth and if you use them you will see
that you are only limited by the speed of your link, I generally get about
10Mbits/second on my cable modem. The mirror I favor is Argonne National
Lab (ANL), but Stanford also works well.

I've never used Vector so I don't know anything about it, however if one
click install is what you want then either the Fedora 9 or Ubuntu Live CDs
will do the trick. In both cases you boot into a full Linux system rather
then the simple installer that you would on the full install DVDs. On the
Live CD desktop there is am install icon, click it and it does an install
with only minimal questions. You could choose to let it use all of it's
defaults, if you do that it's nearly one-click. I prefer to make the
partitioning decisions myself so I always choose Custom Disk Partitioning.
You might want to let the installer make the choices.

The LiveCD installs lightweight applications like Abiword and Gnumeric
instead of Open Office, this is probably what you want. Once you've done
the install you can add anything you want later. In Linux adding more
software is trivial, there is a Software Installer that allows you to
select anything you want and install it from the web, all you have to do
is check the item you want and click a button.

512M meets the minimum requirements of running a full Gnome Desktop, in
fact my sister is using Fedora 8 on a laptop that has a 500MHz PIII and
384M. However adding more memory will greatly improve performance. At
today's memory prices there is no excuse for having less than 4G. If you
look on Newegg you will see that 4G is only $80. Actually 2G will give you
great performance, but memory is so cheap why not get more.

One more thing, if you are still on dial up then you are screwed. There is
no excuse for still using dialup, at the very least you should get an
entry level DSL connection which isn't much more expensive than dialup.
Leading edge Linux distros assume that you have broadband, they have
frequent updates which are untenable without a broadband connection. If
you really can't get broadband then you should forget about any of the
leading edge distros, you should install a stable distro instead. Order a
set of CentOS5.2 CDs from Linux Central. CentOS5.2 is a clone of RHEL5.2.
It's not nearly as advanced as Fedora 9, it's goal is stability. CentOS
has 1% of the updates of Fedora so it's doable with broadband. The reason
for this is that they only provide security patches and bug fixes, Fedora
provides constant updates on everything in the distro because their goal
is to be on the bleeding edge.
.

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