Linux floats my boat since then

[asifnaz]

I came here in UK on student visa like 7 months ago . I had no computer and I am allowed to work only 20 hours a week so I could not even think of buying one .

I need a computer for college work . I found that there was an
abandon laptop eating dust in the store of my building .

It was PIII with 512 ram and 40 gb HD . But its HD was formatted and so there was no OS to run it .

I was really upset as XP was actually way more expensive than hardware itself . I searched online and found Ubuntu I had heared about but never tried it .

I used my room mate's laptop to download and burn 10.04 and Lo!
I installed it and it put a new soul in dead laptop .
I have fallen love with this free and open source OS and softwares .

I love being a Ubuntu guy and preaching this OS since then
your response ...plz

[rokytnji]

Glad things worked out for you. As things get tougher economically. I expect to hear more stories like yours. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Happy Trails, Rok

[MASONTX]

Glad you found Ubuntu. It may not be for everyone, yet, but it sure fills my needs.

[hazel]

This story illustrates a point I have often made (and sometimes been flamed for). You do not really need the kind of heavyweight hardware that most people use these days unless you are playing games or doing video editing. The reason people appear to need it is that they are using bloated software.

Ubuntu is fairly obese by Linux standards but, as you see, it will run happily with 512MB. I use Debian and Crux on a PIII equivalent with 256MB and have no problems at all.

Why is open source software so economical? Because it's not designed to persuade you to buy anything.

[Rubberman]

Ubuntu is based on Debian, and Debian can be easily configured to run happily on systems with 128M or less RAM. I run it on a 64M embedded system board for experimentation and development purposes. With a light-weight X11 desktop, you should have plenty of headroom to run nicely on a 512MB system. So, if it sometimes seems slow because it is hitting the swapper, you might want to consider one of the thinner desktops such as xfce, iceWM, etc. They run fine on Ubuntu. Also, you can reduce the number of services that are automatically started when you boot up. At least you have these options available to you.