Sharing Linux

[Farmer Mike]

Our youngest son and his wife just picked up two hand me down computers.The local Rec Center finally got new systems and gave away the old ones.

One is an E-Machine with 6GB hard drive, 333MHz processor and 256MB of ram. It has Windows 2000 with Works 4.5 .

The second is a Dell, 8GB HD, 333MHz processor and 96MB. It has Windows ME (with no apps).

On the first, I cleared the Administrator password and installed Linux with Windows as a dual boot system.

On the second, I plan to double the RAM with some PC100 I have then replace WinME with a lightweight distro of Linux.

It should be interesting to see how they like Linux.

[amenditman]

On that second machine, have you considered what distro you will install?

I play with a lot of very small distros for fun. 192MB of RAM is pushing it for anything with a full DE.

Tiny Core is by far the neatest yet, but it requires a lot of fiddling.
SliTaz is also very interesting and a lot more install and forget it than Tiny Core.

Bob

[Cityscape]

What distro did you install on the first one? And what are you thinking about installing on second?

Cause I have a similar computer:
- 350 Mhz AMD processor
- 384 MB RAM
- 20 GB hard disk
- 2 MB graphics card

I tried installing Ubuntu 9.04 via Alternate CD on it but it appears to have failed.

[Farmer Mike]

I happened to have a copy of Mandriva one 2009 Xfce which I installed on the first one. It's still a little slow. Given a better selection of distros, I might have used something lighter.

For the second, I'll bring a bunch of Live CDs picked from the poll here on distros for older machines, a search on Distrowatch, and amenditman's advice.
(I downloaded SliTaz.)

Then I'll try each live CD and see what suits the computer and me the best.