UBuntu on older machines ?

[Thomas Beckett]

On Fri, 10 Dec 2004 11:10:45 +0100, Vincent Trouilliez
<vincent.trouilliez at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> > > Now that I have just learned that Ubuntu can run on my old Pentium
> > > 200MMX board with 256MB of RAM, I can't wait to try.
> > >
> > > Vince
> 
> > Don't hesitate, just try it - my organisation has 3 pre-233MHz machines
> > with linux installed. Just try it then post again.
> 
> Okay here is the result with Intel 200MMX board.
> 
> First, my board was more clever that I thought, the BIOS did manage to
> boot from the CD ! :-)
> 
> I put 256MB of RAM on the board, and re-used the original hard drive,
> ATA33  3.2GB disk, as I wasn't sure if my bigger disks would work, I
> seem to remember there was a size limitation problem with disks around
> that time, but I couldn't remember exactly what was the problem. So I
> played it safe and just re-used the original drive.
> 
> The install took well wellll over an hour, probably because of the disk
> that's kinda slow, as Jeff pointed out.
> 
> Despite copying all the packages, Ubuntu used only 1.5GB of space,
> therefore leaving me with another 1.5GB to play with.
> 
> Apart from the on-board sound which didn't work, and Gnome forcing me to
> use a 800*600 screen resolution instead of the 1024*768 I used to use on
> this machine, everything worked perfectly. Laser printer, external ZIP
> drive, Ethernet controller and cable modem/internet, everything was
> working fine out of the box.
> 
> However it was a bit too slow to be useable, calling a Nautilus window
> (say the 'disk' location or 'home' or whatever) took 5 seconds, so it's
> not really suitable for daily use.
> 
> I am sure if the CPU was only a bit faster, it would work well. But
> sadly, 200MHz is already the fastest Pentium one you can get, ISTR.
> 233MHz maybe. I am sure a dual 200MMX board would be plenty powerfull
> enough
> 
> However I have recently been toying with the idea of having a second
> Linux box to build a local Ethernet network, both to serve some specific
> needs I have, but also generally to play with things, experiment with
> Network related things, and learn more about Linux.
> 
> Typically that's what I would like to achieve/experiment with this
> future machine:
> 
> 1) Put several IDE disks and binds them using S/W RAID
> 2) Set up an NFS network with the main/other machine
> 3) Use it to regularly back-up my 10GB or so of precious data from the
> main PC
> 4) Attach laser printer locally and let the main PC access it from the
> network
> 5) fiddle with remote administration, remote control of the PC using
> Gnome's 2.8 new tools.
> 6) local mail
> 7) Intranet / local web server
> 8) Other things that will eventually spring to mind as I go ! ;-)
> 
> But I need first to buy a decent tower case, screen and keyboard and
> mouse hardrive power supply etc, and money is very tight right now.
> But eventually this will come to life sometime next year, at which point
> I will no doubt bombard this list for help. Be prepared folks... ;o)
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Vince
> 
> --
> ubuntu-users mailing list
> ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
> 


why not try xfce instead of a fully blown gnome. Its much faster on
older hardware and still uses gtk. should dowonders for speeding it
up!

Tom