I have never installed a linux.

I wanted to use an older comp to begin with and learn about it... before I make the transition on my other comps.

I am read through this site for days and all of the posts here are great insight.

The linux flavor I am considering is fedora 3.
and the box I was going to install on was a

older dell xps r400
PII 400
192 ram
80 gig HD

I have XP on there right now.. and it is "ok"... but pretty pokey... .. but as a "guest" comp ... in my home office for people to check their email or what not...

Thoughts? Waste of time? or would it be ok?

Thank you for your patience with this NEWBIE.... a NEWB that is planning on not being a NEWB for long.

Thanks again
T

You CPU/RAM are at the minimum for a graphical system...
<< http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc3/x86/ >>

It should be fine as long as you choose a lighter window manager (fluxbox, or such), and stop all the services you don't need.

You should be willing to try several distros, I think. The big "it just works" style distros are a great way to see what linux can be... but they tend to be slower than something that you put together with just a little know-how, so don't get too discouraged if your p2 is slower than with xp (prob. not the case, but still...)

Although your box will not be a speed demon, you should be able to successfully install Linux on it, no problem. Note that some of the desktop environments such as KDE and Gnome are pretty resource-intensive, so you would be better off going with a very lightweight windows manager. Along those lines, if you've got the time and the inclination, you might want to play around with several distros, just to get a feel for what each one is like, then choose the one that you like best.

Anyway, if it's possible to add more RAM into your system, that would be a very worthwhile expense. 192Mg isn't bad, but as you know the more RAM the better. Good luck with it and welcome to LQ -- J.W.

Thank you for all of your suggestions...

This place is awesome.


As to other distros....

Can someone recomend a few .. for my case?

And as too.. the windows manager portion....
What are my options there?...

I am planning on trying it out this week-end...

My ram slots are full... and I am not sure how much is the max I could put on this box.. but thinking that ram is so cheap.. I could just replace one of the simms .. for more...

Thanks
T

Thanks for being kind.

I have a Pentium II / 350 with 256 Mb of RAM.

My present Linux distribution is Fedora Core 2.

The window manager was quite slow after the first installation.

Since then I recompiled the kernel (it took me several reboots and a lot of patience before finding out why my custom kernel wouldn't boot) and tuned KDE (a window manager) to make it use less resources.

The result is quite satisfying.

Thanks for the info.

I guess.. i may be getting in a little over my head.. since I am not a programmer and my knowledge of how to "complile or write" is no existant.

maybe I will just upgrade the board on that computer....

T

Would like you to consider Slackware for this box

A old slow 486-66 16M ram here is running Slackware 10 command line only, as a firewall.
A 166 with 32 M ram is what I am typing this on now. Using the FluxBox window manager. Works great.

I will admit that Slackware is not like other/easier distros to install, but the people here at Linux Questions make what ever problems there are, easy to deal with.

If you find a distro you like, it's easier to use that distro on all your computers. Mainly because you already know how to config things. Thats why I run Slack on the 6 systems here.

don't misunderstand when we say compile from source... all the programming is done for you. Typically, it's just a matter of typing
./config
make
make install

Compiling your kernel is one of the cooler things you can do with linux. You can actually fine tune the core of the operating system to tango with your hardware. There are plenty of how-to's and walkthroughs, and you learn a lot when you do it.

Thanks for all of yours alll suggestion.

As to slackware...

It was recommended to run on older machines...

but in looking at its website....

1. I am not familar with how to use torrent.
2. no offense to Slackware.. but Fedora appears to be an easier install.

Thank you all.

T