11.10 on older hardware?

[Advoc]

I've recently helped a friend upgrade his computer and he gave me all of his old hardware. I actually gave him his computer a few years ago and basically he gave it all back to me minus the case so he could enjoy his new computer.

It was a Compaq X7 gaming computer. P4 HT, 1gb ram (ddr), etc.

It was an early adopter of SATA, and the mobo revision is a compaq revision of an Asus P4C 800E. The mobo is great. Has lots of PCI slots and an 8x AGP slot.

I want to rebuild this computer for my wifes grandpa who is big into social networking and webcam chatting. But her uncle set him up with an old XP machine that runs horribly and fills up with spyware. Grandpa isn't a computer adept by any means. My thoughts are to put 11.10 on it and customize Unity for him to make all of his computer tasks fool proof. Mostly he'll just use Skype, Facebook, and an email client of some sort.

Here is my question / problem.

This mobo has SATA, which was pretty new when it came out. XP cannot install without an unattended disc. Which I used to have, but my friend lost it. ( i burned it form my uncle who was a network administrator and had an OEM disk with a crapload of drivers pre-loaded into it ) The bios recognizes the SATA chip as a RAID driver and I'll need the OS install disc to load drivers for it.

Does the Ubuntu install program have such drivers? If they do, do you suppose the OS will run well on a pentium 4? The compositing features might be a bit much, but I've got a Sapphire radeon x1950 for the computer, (far more than grandpa will need, but it'll work) so I don't think unity desktop will be too hard on the CPU.

Thoughts? I'm picking up a cheap case tomorrow to get started.

[M!K3_$]

If they do, do you suppose the OS will run well on a pentium 4?

I have 11.10 running on an old laptop with similar specs. It should be fine, and if it is too much you can always run a lighter distro.

[as2000]

My garage pc is a P4 2.8Ghz with 1 gig of ram and a very old nVidia 5400 video card that I just put 11.10 on and it runs just fine. I have 10.04 running on my junk laptop which is a Dell c600 with a 850Mhz Pentium III and 384Mb of ram and it moves right along.

I don't think that you will have any issues and if you do, it should be pretty easy to resolve. The laptop had a issue with it's video card resolution stuck in 800x600, but it was a easy fix and now I enjoy 1024x768!

[WasMeHere]

Hello Advoc,

Welcome to the Ubuntu Forums

I agree that you can run Ubuntu on such a computer. I run 'vanilla' Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a Dell with P4 2.8 GHz and its nice, faster than XP and no hardware problems, because the built-in drivers work. There is good support for proprietary drivers for nvidia cards too. Wired ethernet 'always' works out of the box, and several wifi cards are supported.

If you are prepared to tweak the system, you can certainly try 11.04 or 11.10. I think you would need 2 GB of RAM to run well with Unity, but if you select Xubuntu with XFCE desktop or Lubuntu with LXDE, the computer will be fast enough with 1 GB of RAM.

Download the iso files of a few of these flavours (desktop environments) and versions (year.month) and try them running live sessions from a CD or USB drive without installing. When you have tried a few of them, you will see what is cooperating best with the hardware, and install that flavour and version.

Have fun finding out
Olle

[collisionystm]

I've recently helped a friend upgrade his computer and he gave me all of his old hardware. I actually gave him his computer a few years ago and basically he gave it all back to me minus the case so he could enjoy his new computer.

It was a Compaq X7 gaming computer. P4 HT, 1gb ram (ddr), etc.

It was an early adopter of SATA, and the mobo revision is a compaq revision of an Asus P4C 800E. The mobo is great. Has lots of PCI slots and an 8x AGP slot.

I want to rebuild this computer for my wifes grandpa who is big into social networking and webcam chatting. But her uncle set him up with an old XP machine that runs horribly and fills up with spyware. Grandpa isn't a computer adept by any means. My thoughts are to put 11.10 on it and customize Unity for him to make all of his computer tasks fool proof. Mostly he'll just use Skype, Facebook, and an email client of some sort.

Here is my question / problem.

This mobo has SATA, which was pretty new when it came out. XP cannot install without an unattended disc. Which I used to have, but my friend lost it. ( i burned it form my uncle who was a network administrator and had an OEM disk with a crapload of drivers pre-loaded into it ) The bios recognizes the SATA chip as a RAID driver and I'll need the OS install disc to load drivers for it.

Does the Ubuntu install program have such drivers? If they do, do you suppose the OS will run well on a pentium 4? The compositing features might be a bit much, but I've got a Sapphire radeon x1950 for the computer, (far more than grandpa will need, but it'll work) so I don't think unity desktop will be too hard on the CPU.

Thoughts? I'm picking up a cheap case tomorrow to get started.

I would really consider KDE. I think he will feel more at home because of the way it's layed out in comparison to xp

[Advoc]

Trying the different LiveCD's is a good idea. I do plan on it.

As for running KDE for familiarity sake, I don't think it'll be that big of a deal. Mostly everybody (his family) puts icons on the desktop for him to click. The problem is its so loaded with malware (toolbars, email viruses, the usual suspects) that it takes forever for him to start his computer, and when he clicks on something and the computer takes 30 - 45 seconds to open a browser window he thinks he did something wrong, then clicks something else. So he gets confused because he does 2 or 3 things before the first windows opens and he thinks the last thing he did actually did the first thing he tried, if that makes sense. The man is 94 years old and lives in a lodge, he doesn't really have anything he's used to. So if I can set Unity up to just have 4 of 5 icons in the side bar, Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype, the chat applet, maybe even a direct bookmark to Facebook (which he is just learning) that will be enough for him. Less confusing, and no chance of him getting an infection. Not to mention almost instant system boot and programs nearly instantly on. That's my hope.

[Advoc]

Well, I'm looking at 11.10, UNR (the latest version I can find is 9.10, is it not supported anymore?) and Joli OS. I guess that doesn't really fit into the topic of this thread, but I'm investigating which would be the best.

[Script Warlock]

you might consider lubuntu or xubuntu if you like to.

[WasMeHere]

Well, I'm looking at 11.10, UNR (the latest version I can find is 9.10, is it not supported anymore?) and Joli OS. I guess that doesn't really fit into the topic of this thread, but I'm investigating which would be the best.

No 9.10 is not supported anymore, but 10.04 LTS will be supported until April 2013. And I would repeat, that it is really worth trying Lubuntu and Xubuntu. You might also add Linux Mint 11 (Gnome, XFCE or LXDE) to the candidate list.

[kurt18947]

No 9.10 is not supported anymore, but 10.04 LTS will be supported until April 2013. And I would repeat, that it is really worth trying Lubuntu and Xubuntu. You might also add Linux Mint 11 (Gnome, XFCE or LXDE) to the candidate list.

I'd agree with Olle about Xfce or LXDE. Both support "click here" icons though Unity will too. As long as the user can cope with applications different than he's used to he -and most casual users - doesn't need to interact much with the O.S. Be sure to enable 'download and install security updates automatically' in update manager. Beyond security updates I'd think that the fewer changes the better.