Old hardware brought back to life

[fantab]

Give Knoppix a try, and don't miss out its 'cheat sheet'.

[mörgæs]

What about giving them Lubuntu 13.10 now with a free install of 14.04 (in May/June) included?

[Nopposan]

Thanks for your suggestions.

Actually, what I think I'll do is test Lubuntu 14.04 beta, tweak and write scripts for automating tweaks, play around with cloning via fsarchiver, then upgrade my test machine to the official release when it happens mid-April, then reiterate with corrections from what I've learned.

Does that sound like a good plan? Would I be better off experimenting with 13.10 and then upgrading to 14.04 LTS in April? I really don't see anything preferable to Lubuntu LTS at this time. I could play around with Debian Stable with backports running LXDE and lightdm, but it will take more time to configure it for newbies, and the Ubuntu community is thought to be a more friendly place for newbies anyway. (I hazard to guess that most people on the Debian forums will agree that Ubuntu is better for newbs.) Besides I encountered unusual difficulties with my Debian install getting permanently stuck after network detection.

[sudodus]

@Nopposan,

You can try the 9w debian installer and install Lubuntu Core Trusty with a non-pae kernel. It is made for very old computers. See this link (posts #88 and #89 and following)

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...6#post12957586

and this link to the download site

http://phillw.net/isos/linux-tools/9w/

Try any of the iso files, but maybe this one will be best for your particular task to revive old computers

http://phillw.net/isos/linux-tools/9...e-LubuCore.iso

[eric13]

Unfortunately, at this time, neither is LXLE. It would probably run well, once installed, but it doesn't come with an alternaive installer from Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer; therefore, it will not install on machines with 256MB or less RAM.

Indeed, the installer does not work on a test VM if I set only 256MB of RAM. Too bad they did not include the alternative installer!

I just read about Zion OS 6.2 Lite, another distrib based on Lubutu 12.04 with LTS (and thus supported until 2017, though I could not find any clear statement on the website) http://zorin-os.com
I haven't tried yet, but it looks actually very good! The Lite version is supposed to run fine with only 128 MB or RAM and 266 MHz x86 processor!!
EDIT: tested on a VM, livecd then install ok with 256MB RAM. With 128 MB RAM, it did not advance so shut it down.

[bjje]

I'm not sure that I understand the difference between installing ubuntu and loading LXDE as a package later, choosing it on login. Just packages they come with or more under the hood?
I've got 14.04b on an old machine this week and with LXDE it's working great. Unity not so much.

[sudodus]

You can install a minimal system from the Ubuntu mini.iso and add LXDE. It will give you a very light system, where you can add whatever mixture of programs, that you prefer, and avoid programs, that you won't use anyway. The developer of Lubuntu has done that job for you and offers a standard environment with LXDE and a mixture of programs plus some tweaking.

If you start with standard Ubuntu and add LXDE the Ubuntu desktop environment, Unity, and the standard Ubuntu mixture of programs will stay there. You will be able to select either of the desktops at the log in screen. This is possible, and some people have such a system, and accept or even prefer to have double sets of software for some tasks.

Lubuntu has LXDE - ultra-light desktop environment
Xubuntu has XFCE - medium light desktop environment
Ubuntu has Unity - fancy but heavy desktop environment
Kubuntu has KDE - fancy but heavy desktop environment

The engine under the hood is the same in all these flavours, and there are some differences in the choice of application programs.

[sudodus]

The following link has a lot of good tips about what to consider and ask for when converting a Windows computer to linux.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...1#post13016261

[eric13]

For a early Athlon64 3200+ with 2 GB or RAM, I still plan to install Lubuntu14.4 LTS
Do you recommend the 64 bits or 32 bits variant?
As I have enough RAM, I tend to the 64bits one: nowadays, I think that most people do use the 64bits, and thus, these program are better tested and supported. What do you think?

For those hesitating between different distributions, I just tried the multicd script ( http://multicd.tuxfamily.org/index.html ) so that I can put 5 live cd on the same iso (which I will put on a usb HDD). Pretty handy! Don't forget to rename the Ubuntu derivatives (e.g. LXLE or Bodhi) to xxx.ubuntu.iso so that the script can handle them!

[sudodus]

Both 32 bits and 64 bits should work well. The 64-bit system will use more RAM for the same tasks, but should be faster. I don't know for such an old 64-bit system if there will be regressions. In other words, I can't really tell, please try both and compare