Yes, I was all excited when I plugged in an old dusty PC and found it still alive with a 32 gig hard drive & 260 Megs of RAM with an open slot for more memory, fit for my first Linux system. Then I navigated to device manager and found it was powered by a celeron, which was kind of a bummer.

Anyway, can I get by with this setup? I'd like to use the slackware distribution, and my main purpose is to learn to administer a LAN, starting w/ 2 local clients, & a server that also runs Apache.

No doubt

Welcome to LQ bluegospel!

Sure, Slack should run on a Celeron; why not?

What are the exact specs of machine?

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Wow, your 'old machine' has about 28 Gigs more disk space, and about the same RAM, as my 'old machine' here which I have used as LAN firewall + FTP server + DHCP server -- I'd say yours will work just great as a learning machine. I ran a Slack-based distro on mine too, and I figure a celeron will pose no problems or troubles.

Good luck with this!

Sasha

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Well, this is what I know,

It's a Dell Dimension (DIM 2400), Intel (R) Celeron (R) 2.4 GHz, 2.39 GHz, 256 MB Ram.

I'm not sure why my system properties has two speeds for the processor, and I'm not sure how to get more specific as to my system's properties. Sorry.

Oh, thanks for the warm welcome. This forum seems much friendlier than some of the others I've visited.

Easily! I could even see a nice OpenBox or LXDE setup on that. XFCE may work, but it might be a bit hefty. I'm not sure what the processor being a Celeron has to do with anything though... At 2.4 GHz you've got well enough to run any Linux distro easily. If you upgrade that RAm a little bit, it's likely you could even fit Ubuntu, openSUSE and the other big names out there.

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I think it is a common misconception that celerons are bad processors. I had a pentium 4 based celeron in my pc running at 2.29 ghz and changed to a pentium 4 (due to a heatsink incident) running at the same speed and I can't tell a difference except the pentium 4 runs much hotter. This is my main pc. If you think THATS old you should see my g3 based laptop. Celerons sometimes get a bad rap because people compare a pentium II based celeron with a pentium 4. Obviously the celeron isn't even in the same league.

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I'll jump in and add that I've had Ubuntu running on a 566MHz Celeron w/256Mb RAM without any issues- no doubt Slack will run just fine on yours.

Cheers

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This is quite a powerful machine, but the RAM doesn't match what the processor is able to do. If possible, add RAM, up to 512 MB or 768 MB. You will be able to run all distro's and desktops but KDE4 is likely a too bloated and resource-hungry.

jlinkels

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A Celeron versus a Pentium III or 4 at the same speed would be a little slower, but the CPU clock rate and memory bus speed are still the most important factors for performance. I don't recommend running Linux and X-Windows with less than 512 MB of RAM. They will run with less, but usually slower because of the need to swap some memory out to disk. GNOME is a bit less memory hungry than KDE, and XFCE is even smaller. Ubuntu runs well with around 384 MB of RAM and you can get by with 256 MB but it may be a bit slow.

Celerons aren't bad processors. They are just expensive for the performance you get. Intel created the Celeron so that they could charge somewhat less for the CPU but they also reduced the performance by a much larger percentage. Spending a little more money on the CPU gets you a lot more performance. A Celeron is also a simpler design so there is less to go wrong in the way of chipset and memory timing issues. Intel can get higher yields and more good chips in each batch of manufactured Celerons.

One of the great things about Linux based systems is that they're scalable. One can choose the GUI and desktop (or even omit them completely). The Windows one size fits all approach requires a system that can support the complicated GUI and other services. It's a lot harder to scale Windows down for less powerful hardware. Although Microsoft removed some features for marketing reasons (to sell them at a premium) that doesn't significantly reduce the resource requirements for the home versions versus the professional versions.

The main issue with Linux is compatibility. That's more of a consideration in choosing the hardware and software. As long as one gives some thought to the choices, Linux can do almost anything that Windows can do. Windows compatibility has been slowly getting worse as the PC industry abandons long established standards. Meanwhile Linux compatibility has been slowly getting better. Much of Windows compatibility is dependent on third party companies, and that isn't as much of an issue with Linux where a lot of hardware is supported by native Linux drivers that are maintained with the kernel.

Older hardware is much more likely to be compatible with current versions of Linux, and much less likely to be compatible with newer versions of Windows. In some cases, "bleeding edge" hardware is more compatible with Windows but I've usually been able to get my new system builds working with Linux. Linux is my "Swiss Army Knife" even on Windows systems. Having a second choice when problems occur in Windows is helpful. I can tell if the hardware is generally working and I can often do what I need using Linux and investigate the Windows problem later.

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Hi,

Slackware will work fine on that class of hardware. Don't worry about the Celi, it's performance will be fine. I would add as much RAM as you can still find. Get it while still available at some of the recyclers. That is unless you have a nice spares box of goodies.

As for a experimental bench, good box to use for such a system. I suggest that you start using the LQ Slackware Forum if you have any problems or questions with Slackware.

Just a few useful links to aid your endeavors;

Slackware® Essentials
Slackware® Basics
Linux Documentation Project
Rute Tutorial & Exposition
Linux Command Guide
Bash Reference Manual
Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
Linux Newbie Admin Guide
LinuxSelfHelp
Getting Started with Linux

These links and others can be found at 'Slackware-Links' .
More than just Slackware® links!

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Wow, I've using Slack12 and 13 with KDE4 in a machine with a CPU P4 a little bit less powered than yours... and it worked fine, a little bit slow on startup. But it had twice the memory and 4 times swap

Anyway, if you like XFCE/OpenBox/Fluxbox, surely your machine will do just fine

EDIT: And of course, if you can get some more mem, the more the better

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Hi,

Why so much swap?

Oh, just bluffing about that I got same size of RAM/swap. But Slack13/KDE4 did worked out nicely enough :-)

I have an i7 920 overclocked blah blah blah........ But just as often I am using this Celeron based machine with 1GB RAM because of it's location. Granted that's mostly just browsing and playing around, but it's more than fine.