I'm planing to install linux on a P4 1.5Ghz with 256MB of RAM, and Geforce4Ti4200 128MB.

My question is:
Do i need the 2.6 kernel, will it make things faster?
iv'e heard the 2.4 is more stable and is better for older computers, but someone told me thats rubish, so i want more opinions.

nice hardware...

if there's some hardware which you have which isn't supported by 2.4, then yes... also, if there's some feature you want which is available only in 2.6, then yes...

it depends on what you are doing... but generally speaking, for a desktop, 2.6 does tend to provide you with better performance much of the time - especially if you choose the preemption option which it provides...

yes, it is... but that's not necessarily a good thing all the time... too much stability can be a bummer in some situations... keep in mind i'm using the original definition of stability (not the media definition which refers to how crash-prone software is)...

yeah, sometimes it is... but your hardware doesn't sound old at all...

well, the thing is that IT DEPENDS... just saying "it's better for older computers" is too much of a broad statement... the real answer is IT DEPENDS on the hardware and mission you are talking about... 2.4 will be a better choice on some old hardware, that's a fact - but don't assume this means that it will be a better choice on ALL old hardware... 2.6 is indeed able to give you more bang for your buck on some old hardware...

personally, i've been running 2.4 for the longest time and haven't had any need or desire to go to 2.6, even if it would indeed get me a slight performance boost... BTW, i'm on a 1.2Ghz Athlon with 512MB of 266Mhz DDR RAM and an Nvidia GeForce4 MX440 64MB...

your best bet might be to try both and see what happens...

my suggestion is that you should pick a 2.6-based distro and go with that...

ubuntu would be a really good choice, for example...

just my ...

Thank you very much,

i don't think i have any special hardware... just a Cnet ethernet card, and a SoundBlaster Live! (which must work, because i love my music collection)

i'll have to benchmark it by myself then...
what synthetic benchmarks do you suggest i'll do? (any scripts you know...?)
(i mean, there is no other objective way to measure performance...)

i think i'll go with Gentoo (going all the way )
and after i'll benchmark it, i'll go get something that actually works without waiting days for something to install

sounds like a plan, good luck!!!

no, i don't know any benchmark scripts... but AFAIK there's some things in which the performance gain from 2.6 will be quite obvious... maybe 3D games or something like that, i'm not sure... you could look for some 2.4 vs. 2.6 benchmarks on the web and then copy whatever methods _they_ used to do your own benchmarks... i think i've seen Doom 3 used for this type of stuff...

heh, doom3 wont run on this computer =P
I can try quake though...
But i don't play on this computer much, i surf alot, listen to music and paint with GIMP (and samba network is important too).

The problem is right now that when the HD is busy, i can't work at all... because all my operations a paged on the HD (don't have enough RAM to run it all).
I need the computer to be usable even when other people copy files from my HD...

So, my goal is to use X, with as little RAM footprint as possible, while still being able to browse for files graphically (and jumping to file when i start writing it's name), copy n' paste, open apps quickly via a menu, and have a dock panel...

2.6 based distros run just fine on one of my older computers: P3 1GHz, 512Mb ram, GeForce2 video card, SoundBlaster Live!, and 3Com ethernet card. This hardware is quite a bit inferior to what you've got.

it's not inferior because you got 512MB RAM, and that's the problem with my machine... see my last post...