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Thread: Which Distro?

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    Which Distro?

    I have an old Dell which my parents use - by old think nearly 10 years, originally shipped with Win98SE, then I put XP on it. I want to reformat the drive, for a variety of reasons, and put a linux distro on there for them (since it's free, and a genuine version of XP home would not be).

    They basically use it for the internet - so Mozilla Firefox, and would print some occasional documents - typically from the web.

    I know these are features which every distro would do, but I'm trying to find something very user friently for a pair of senior citicizens who are used to an XP PC and panic at the first sign of a dialogue box they do not recognise or an interface which has changed!

    The PC specs, just for a giggle, Pentium III, 700Mhz, 640mb RAM.

    So, suggest away! - And also, if anyone has any tips RE installing it that would be great - I've only ever used linux distros for disaster recovery!

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    Re: Which Distro?

    Thanks Jay, I didn't think spec would be a huge issue - I know a lot of these distros run on virtually nothing compared to Microsoft OSs. The name will certainly be a draw for them

    I presume I can burn the pup-430.iso to a CD and run as a Live CD first to see what I reckon before installing it?
    Last edited by oldskooladdict; 30-12-2009 at 12:47 PM.

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    Re: Which Distro?

    yes you can
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    Re: Which Distro?

    I would try Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux.

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    Re: Which Distro?

    Nobody reccomend Open SUSE or Linux Mint - I just found some distro chooser that gives multi choice questions and it came up with those two top.

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    Re: Which Distro?

    opensuse and ubuntu (mint) runs slow even on my recent PC so I'd avoid them if possible. I'd be very inclined to use pclinuxos xfce or lxde since it gets everything right from a fresh install (flash plugin, video audio codecs, etc) and imo a far better desktop linux than ubuntu. Its also a rolling release distro and very snappy to use.
    The only other linux desktop that is usable in my experience is debian Xfce but you may find it a bit outdated unless you go for debian sid or unstable.

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    Re: Which Distro?

    I'm quite keen on something which will be snappy, and something which I can try on a live CD first - it seems PC Linux OS fits the bill on both cases there. You reccomend teh xfce version, I know it might be a bit tricky to explain to a Linux novice, but how does this differ to the KDE, GNOME, LXDE or E-17 desktops? - I have the xfce on my netbook (Linpus Lite), and you tend to see KDE or GNOME quite a bit.

    When you say it's also a rolling release distro do you just mean it's updated often? (Obviously a good thing).

    Do all of these (or most) tend to work in the same way as MS OSs - i.e. updates often offered and stuff.

    Also - a total newbie question, with their increasing popularity does one need a firewall or AV with them, or is this still unnecessary?

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    Re: Which Distro?

    Thought I'd chip in and sugges you look at Ubuntu just maybe the livecd. For the human amongst us it certainly heads in the same direction as windows on the usability stakes, have to admit though having used it for a few years now its always best to get the LTS versions for other peoples systems rather than the latest non-lts version. LTS is always the most stable and usable. I think right now the last LTS was 8.04, should they like the darker side of life check out Ubuntu SE by Garry Parker haha!

    I thought opensuse was horrid tbh and would not dare install it for others, i just found it a backwards step from Ubuntu.

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    Re: Which Distro?

    While the Linux kernel itself is pretty efficient and will run on reasonaly low end hardware, when yiou srtart adding a GUI, such as Gnome or KDE, so that you can run graphical apps like Firefox, you start upping the system requirement consuiderably.

    For the main strean distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, you are looking at a minimum of a 1GhZ pentium and about 1G og RAM. I haven't tried DSL, Puppy or Mint, but if you are running a Gui on them, then you still need something with a bit of grunt.

    Certainly try your 10 year old DELL, with a live CD, but don't be too surprised if the performance is less than sparkling.

    However you can build a machine that will do what yopu are intending quite cheaply. Pretty much any MoBo with onboard graphics will do what you want and you can buy on a cost basis rather than optimising for performance.

    http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asus-...I-On-Board-VGA

    http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/AMD-A...che-65W-Retail

    Plus 1G Ram and a small disk drive could be built for around £150 or less.
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    Re: Which Distro?

    I've got my dad a decent Win7 laptop for his birthday - 2nd of Jan - I'm hoping both my parents can use this, however, I still want to try and tinker with this ancient Dell PC.

    The machine runs XP Pro reasonably well, which is of course a GUI, and I thought it would be more resource intensive than most Linux Distros.

    I'll stear clear of Open SUSE then, it seems you guys don't favour it.

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    Re: Which Distro?

    KDE, GNOME, LXDE, XFCE are the desktop environments. Think of it as the graphical front end to the underlying operating system. They control the windows, icons, etc.
    LXDE and XFCE are considered as the lightweight desktop environments, takes less memory and is generally used for older computers. They're not as pretty as KDE4 or gnome and comes with minimal software(bloat) installed.

    With recent linux distros you can easily get security updates using package managers just like Windows Update in XP. Rolling release distros like pclinuxos offer software updates as soon as they are tested so you often don't have to wait for the next big release cycle that may take 6/12/24 months. E.g You can upgrade from Firefox 3 to Firefox 4 much faster than people using Ubuntu.

    I've not found much use for antivirus apart from scanning emails entering my mail server but perhaps its a good idea to run them anyway if you have memory to spare.

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    Re: Which Distro?

    Quote Originally Posted by oldskooladdict View Post
    I have an old Dell which my parents use - by old think nearly 10 years, originally shipped with Win98SE, then I put XP on it. I want to reformat the drive, for a variety of reasons, and put a linux distro on there for them (since it's free, and a genuine version of XP home would not be).

    They basically use it for the internet - so Mozilla Firefox, and would print some occasional documents - typically from the web.

    I know these are features which every distro would do, but I'm trying to find something very user friently for a pair of senior citicizens who are used to an XP PC and panic at the first sign of a dialogue box they do not recognise or an interface which has changed!

    The PC specs, just for a giggle, Pentium III, 700Mhz, 640mb RAM.

    So, suggest away! - And also, if anyone has any tips RE installing it that would be great - I've only ever used linux distros for disaster recovery!
    Do them a favor and throw that 10 year old computer away.

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    Re: Which Distro?

    Quote Originally Posted by 12GaugeShotty View Post
    Do them a favor and throw that 10 year old computer away.
    As you can see above mate - they are getting a new laptop (better than any of my PCs or laptops lol) very soon which should make the old Dell retired basically, however, I still wanna give this a go - Just a case of getting round to it I guess.

    Must burn some of those distros I grabbed yesterday and see how they go as Live CDs.

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    Re: Which Distro?

    Quote Originally Posted by oldskooladdict View Post
    As you can see above mate - they are getting a new laptop (better than any of my PCs or laptops lol) very soon which should make the old Dell retired basically, however, I still wanna give this a go - Just a case of getting round to it I guess.

    Must burn some of those distros I grabbed yesterday and see how they go as Live CDs.
    That's good news then.

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