distro testing system?

[Weedman]

i was wondering if this system would be good as a tester for linux distros. I want to learn about Linux and get around to more distros than Mandrake and Fedora (btw, fedora core 4's really sic, even after less than a weeks playing around with it).

my system

1.2 ghz celeron cpu
128mb ram
2x3gb hdds
dvd burner
sound card
network "
32mb tnt2 graphics

The reasoning behind my idea was that there is not much more upgading i can do to it. the cpu is maxed out and the card slots are pretty much all used. the memory i know i would have to upgade so i can at least get FC4 working on it (maybe 512mb, it sounds ok).The hdd would have to be upgaded to something more modern (like 40gb for a start). The MOST IMPORTANT feature of this system is that it has the only NVIDIA gpu in our household [our other 2 systems have a ATI radeon 9600XT (256mb) and a S3 (2mb)].

the system though is somewhat unstable from a botched BIOS flash (by me of course).

would it be powerful enough? (i know that FC4 only requires a 400Mhz cpu)

thanks
weed (the one and only and with the bong)

[josolanes]

if it runs fedora core 4, you should be fine running many of the others. fc4, suse, and the other easy to use ones tend to use more resources than, let's say, slackware or gentoo (which aren't quite as user friendly to set up).

another thing that you might want to try (if you haven't already) is try different window managers. there are many, many more out there other than kde and gnome. i found changing those really made things interesting...and it could make the os much less resource intensive too as gnome and kde use a lot more resources than other window managers.

[Weedman]

i understand and i have tried install fluxbox under mandrkae 10.0 on that very same computer with no luck. What i really want to to is to test the common distros, like fedora,Suse,Debain etc for myself so i can get the most out of the learning that will come with it. My goal one day is to buld Gentoo from a stage 1 tarball. Anyway it would hepl my partents understand linux more.

in the mean time i will still use a mainstream distro (in this case FC4) to do my proper work on it, and that computer for testing of each distro. I feel like experimenting

edit: i tried FC4 on the computer and it crashed abnormally just as it was going to install everything. that may have to do with the ram.