This is my unit.
Dell latitude
Pent 3
650/500 clock
256KB cache
128MB Memory
Primary H/D 12073MB
Win2k Pro
I'm looking to be free the bonds of windows.
I have many very basic questions. Any good reading to answer those?
What's a distro? a gui? How do I download a cd? See, very basic for just learning Linux.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrrFTmKPT2s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8848WxKuJIM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBJB...X-3_LMaIWfdK4t

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=tinycore

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/11023

Pick cd first in bios. I recommend this because of your 128MB of ram listed. If you added ram to 256MB.
You would be better off in Tiny Core.

Hi,
The CPU and 12 GB hard disk should be fine.

The biggest issue will be with 128MB of ram. You are going to be quite limited in what you can run. If there is any chance you could add some more ram you really should. Dumpster diving for other old notebook and extracting their ram is always an option.

However even with 128MB ram you should be able to have stable working system. It won't be able to run the "latest and greatest", but it will be able to run the "latest" of a number of programs. Don't fall into the trap of thinking "I have old hardware" therefore "I should use old software".

Most of your questions have ready answers online.
In this context it is slang for a "Linux Distribution" See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution
A "graphical user interface. Seed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface
You don't. You download a cd image, or "iso" file. Which you then write or "burn" to a blank cd.

Once you've read some answers to the questions you posed, we can discuss what to install on your machine and how.

HTH,

Evo2.

To be fair, many OS's could run on that but you'd suffer from always going to the slow swap space you'd need to make on the hard drive. In this system, you almost need swap for any distro.

Consider Slitaz, Puppy, DSL, Antix (I think), Tinycore, crunchbang, maybe Vector, slax maybe, some others even.


http://www.tuxradar.com/content/what...t-linux-distro

There's more that I forgot to say.
The Dell had a touch pad/cursor problem where the cursor would move to the side of the screen and not come back. I solved it by disabling it in the bios and adding a USB keyboard and PS2 mouse. There was also a keyboard problem where certain keys would repeat. Ok, so maybe as I see this before me I might consider another computer. I have started to collect the info sent and am still learning about Linux. I think it's time I renewed my library card.
Thanks to all who replied and if you have any more ideas I will still be looking here.

Hi,

Using an external mouse and keyboard shouldn't be a problem.

Presumably, using the external keyboard solved this?

You should be able to comfortably run a distro such as slitaz on this machine, and if you are able to get an additional 128 MB ram your options start to open up.

While libraries can be nice, don't forget that the most up to date information is always on the web: as are people who can answer specific questions.
Feel free to post back if you have more questions, or when you are ready to take the plunge and do the installation.

Evo2.

"I think it's time I renewed my library card."

Funny, I started on BSD way before linux. I then bought a book about linux that had a method to run linux within dos. I think it was a stroke of luck I got a good book first try. You have so many options now for information. The best I had was what we called a bulletin board. Cost like $20 a month to connect at 2400 baud. Bet a common public library would have more than a few books on linux. I know second hand stores have them, I buy one or two once in a while.

I recently loaded Slackware 13.37 (Slackware being a Linux distribution) on a 13 year-old 900 MHz 256MB Gateway computer, and it's running well enough using XFCE (the desktop environment, or GUI). If you're considering a new computer, I say play around with a few distributions just to see how well they function on your current hardware (if you don't need the computer to always be usable). I was loading Slackware on this system just to see how well it would run, and to wipe all the old data on the Windows 2000 system before disposing of it, but now that it's a well running computer again I'm tempted to get a new networking card and hold onto it.

As you may have discovered by now, there are hundreds of Linux "distributions." What makes it Linux is that it's running the Linux kernel. Then there are the major distributions, which many different teams end up tweaking to produce variants, add features, smooth out rough edges, and so on. Being free software, this can be done over and over, so Debian is one of the older distributions that was tweaked by Canonical to create the Ubuntu distribution, which has been made into many different variants, but Debian itself still exists and is in active development. Slackware is also an old distribution, still in active development, which was used to create other variants. You can see some of the lineage by checking out www.distrowatch.com. Click the links for the top ten or so distributions on the list on the right of the page and you can see what distributions they were based off of.

Then there are the desktop environments, the most popular of which are KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, and XFCE, plus a few others. These just set up your point-and-click interface (GUI) differently, some requiring more resources than others. On your current hardware I'd certainly go for something light. Slackware 13.37 offers XFCE, one of the lighter desktop environments.

Linux is loaded with options. I hope you have fun with it.