Re: Linux distro to ressurect a ~6 year old PC. Very tech-unsavy user.

On Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:16:50 +0000, Rahul wrote:

ray <ray@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in news:79af5iF1n12uoU8@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

I'd probably suggest Ubuntu, but it would be a shot in the dark without
some system specs. "6 year old" does not help much - I have a system


Hi Ray, sorry about the lack of hardware details. I haven't set sight on
the machine yet.

But, on the other hand that's exactly the point of the post: Given a
black- box for hardware what's a Linux distro that would have the best
chance at working? Does this question have an answer? Maybe it is a bad
question.

I'm not a Windoze lover but honsetly that's something Win did pretty
well. You could pretty much install it on a random box from the last 10
years and expect to have a decent install. Nothing fancy but sound,
printer, internet. [ I do realize that Win's friendliness with hardware
might in fact be just mere lucky-chance since its popularity may have
meant a lot of drivers were written for Win and not *nix. ]

No offense here, either. But be honest. Vista is the current MS offering
- could you install and run vista on it? There are many machines out
there that won't handle vista.

Most likely, it's at least 1ghz with at least 512mb RAM. In that case,
most any modern Linux distro should work fine. I'd stick with a
'mainline' distro myself. I've always enjoyed Debian based distros more
than rpm based ones. My first choice would probably be Ubuntu or Debian.
If it comes up short, then there are another level of options to consider
- choices like you don't have with MS - right now, it's vista or vista.



Of course, I'd be stupid if I suggested Linux trying to go the Win way.
That is just not the point. Yet, for certain scenarios (like my current
need) the ability of an OS to get along with a variety of assorted
hardware s is desirable. It would be stupid to expect all distros to try
to do that. There would be performance tradeoffs. e.g. I wouldn't like
my Linux distros on servers to be bloated with drivers for esoteric
devices.

Yet for my current situation I was wondering if one distro was better at
handling random old HW than others. Speaking just statistically. I
really really don't want to modprobe eth drivers for this "project" :(

You'd be well advised to try some Linux Live CDs on the machine before
you install. That's another option that MS does not provide. I'd suggest
you start with the Ubuntu Live CD. If it loads and runs with no problems
you can then install from it.
.

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