Trying to boot for installation

[Liam Proven]

On 8 April 2013 18:21, George Reinhart <george at netwind.org> wrote:

>
> No, the GX1 is not the "target" machine.  That's a Dell DHP, 1024 MB RAM,
> 266Mhz processor, and plenty of empty hard disk, with no OS on it at all.

1GB of RAM is not much in 2013. A 266MHz processor is /very/ slow -
that was low-end around 15yr ago in the late 1990s!

I bought my 350MHz Pentium II in 1998 and that was when such machines
were getting cheap - I built it into an old Baby-AT format case to
save some money. It think that the machine cost about £300 then,
including CPU, motherboard and RAM.

> My wife's old XP machine has a CD burner on it, but we don't have anything
> with a DVD burner, and the DHP doesn't even have a DVD reader.

Realistically, you are using hardware that is too old to run any
modern OS, I'm afraid.

This is what I would consider to be a very, *very* low-end machine today:
http://www.morgancomputers.co.uk/product_detail/13077/Optiplex-GX620-SFF-Intel-P4-2-8Ghz-1GB-80GB-XP-Pro/

A Pentium 4 2.8GHz with 1GB of RAM and 80GB of hard disk. It has a DVD
drive. It is £45. I don't know where in the world you are, but that is
under US$70.

I would have taken the 266MHz to be a typo, perhaps for 2.66GHz, but
when you say that you do not own a machine with a DVD reader - let
alone a burner - then perhaps you are right.

You /might/ be able to get the low-end Lubuntu version to run on such
a machine, but it will be painfully slow to use.

http://lubuntu.net/

Note that the current version of Lubuntu requires a fairly new
processor - I suspect that it might not run at all on a chip as slow
as a 266MHz device, which is about 10-20× slower than a modern CPU.

There is an older version of Lubuntu that might work, but it is not a
"Long Term Support" version so it is close to the end of its life now.
This is an update of it but it will struggle on your machine:
http://www.lxle.net/

>  We're trying
> to get to the point where the various things necessary to our lives will all
> run on some single machine, which is what I'm hoping to get to with Linix.
> What I need optimally is some relatively small program that can run from a
> CD, access the .ISO file on a USB stick, and go from there.

This is possible, but seriously, I think that you are onto a losing
bet with a machine which, by the sound of it, is over a decade old,
probably a decade and a half.

You can get a machine with a much better specification for very little
money now. Here is an example:
http://www.morgancomputers.co.uk/product_detail/13112/Dell-Optiplex-755-USFF-C2D-2GB-80GB-Core-2-Duo-2-2GHhz-XP-Pro/

That's a recent Core 2 processor, a DVD reader and CD burner, 2GB of
RAM and 80GB of disk - a very low spec today - for £108. That's just
under US$165. That will run a modern version of Ubuntu just fine.



--
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