Hi David. I understand that it will limit performance. But I just need it as a learning computer. Not worried about it
being a bit slow.
There is no socket to plug in a monitor on the mother board. It must have come from HP the way it is.
I don't know what you mean about Northbridge. Can you explain?
Thanks David.

George in Jersey

I have ScientificLinux 6.1 running just fine on a 12 year old dell
1 gig ram
Gforce2 mx 400 card ( 720,000 tx/sec and your gf4 is a 1.2 million )
320 gig hdd space and a 1.9 Ghz p4

I am running an 9 old HP Pavilion a320n, with Debian Squeeze and Gnome.
My crappy video card: nVIDIA nForce2 IGP.
This system isn't a speed machine but it is quite responsive.

Here is where I go for legacy NVidia drivers http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

It even has a "supported hardware" tab so you can verify your downloading the proper driver.

Don't give up.

Hi there

When install system on old computers, we have to remember it wasn't made to run new software/systems the way they are presented to us, it doesn't meant we can't do it but we have to change the way the install is to fit it to the old hardware without force it to death. We don't want to load in our small truck with double the size of the cargo it can carry, well we can but we shouldn't cos it is going to broke for sure. That kind of workload is going to stress the hardware and make it lives way less than it really should.

Old computers run better with distributions that are ligthweigth, and it means low memory footprint, low processor use, generating fast or super fast performance without stress the hardware.

I do like old computers and to have custom Linux install on them i said custom not default, because we have the option to do it the way we want, or better, the way it is better for that hardware, yes sometimes we can't just do it the way we really want, and we have to respect that old hardware and do it to the way it will work without stress.

Ok that is somewhat old:
But i have older i put this one together in 1998:
Cyrix MII-366(250Mhz) 96MB RAM Video Riva TNT 32MB, funny the video card is way newer than the computer!!

Regards

Hi,
about >
It's silly to say 1GB and a 2.66 ghz Pentium 4 will limit your performance. This computer has 1GB and an AMD Sempron 2600, and it does fine. <
... I actually did some tests on a HP pavilion laptop of (bought so probably of 2002) 2003 with 20 GB HDD, 400MB (!) mem, with Ubuntu 11.10 compared with the updated windows XP (SP2 -> SP3) it was delivered with + all automatic updates from Microsoft.
I did a new install for the test, so I didn't have a virus-scanner anymore on XP which takes a lot of effort for the system (booting before the new install took several hours).
For almost all tasks it runs a lot faster with Ubuntu + Firefox then XP with IE-Exploder, only some pages had browser issues and were slower with Firefox. With Firefox over on XP it was between them but more on the 'XP-side'.
Opening documents with LibrOffice, for small text-documents there is no real difference to be noticed, but if they are a bit larger and really for images or spreadsheets, the differences were huge, huge, huge.
One file (spreadheet) took 46 minutes to load and display on XP and only 3 minutes on Ubuntu on this same laptop.
With some investigation, XP was doing a lot of swapping and Ubuntu just a little, tiny bit: the OS needs a lot less memory for the same tasks.
Of course, XP with all updates runs a lot slower then the original XP SP2 from 2002.

Actually, I did some compairing with a newer laptop, Sony Vaio of 2010 with 2 Gigs (like on the other laptop: the maximum for the system) of RAM, running on Win7 32 bit.
Guess what: the old 2003-Ubuntu 11.10 system is in many cases faster than this Win7-system.
Internet-browsing: the old laptop wins, opening small files: ubuntu still wins, opening the large spreadsheet-file: loading on the Win7 Vaio is faster then on the Ubuntu-system, but including display the differences about dissappear: also 3 minutes.
Win7 was doing a lot of swaps also.

Actually, I think when I find some way of dissabling blutooth on the older laptop (there is no blutooth availlable but it is loading and using memory), the Ubuntu old laptop will be even faster then this.
Of course, there will be cases on which the newer laptop with win7 will be faster then the 8 year older laptop with less memory and processing-capacity but it makes clear that even on hardware that is too old Ubuntu still makes a good work.
With a lighter distribution it will probably 'run fast' but I like to have the same OS-es on multiple computers.
So, I really hope the graphic-solution is getting you a fast computer too!

You cant get good idea of the speed from the GHz ratings alone.

Sorry to say, but your 2.66GHz is slowwww. Not as slow as a 1GHz P3, nowhere near as faster as newer CPUs, even those with lower clock speeds.

Actually, nVidia still supports the GF4MX series (GF2-GF4, 96.XX drivers). Just nVidia is really, _really_ slow at updating the drivers to work with newer xorg versions.

It should work with xorg 1.10 (and possibly newer as well) with the closed drivers, and nouveau should work even if the closed drivers dont.

I should pull out the GF4MX hanging around here to test that.

Of course, being ubuntu based (I'm assuming 'normal' mint, not mint 'debian edition') I wouldnt be suprised if the 96.XX closed drivers, or nouveau, were buggy.

It should be a AGP card, not a PCI card. Not that its super easy to pick the different between AGP and PCI if you dont perviously know about it. Here is the product pages-

http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/biz...odTypeId=12454

http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/biz...ctID=c00019945

There should also be onboard video, but I wouldnt even try it. Intel 8XX video chips (which is what is in your HP Pavilion a255c) are known to have bugs. The 2nd link shows you an 'overview' of the motherbaord, and gives you an idea of where the on-board VGA connector is, if you eally want to try it out.

You could get a PCI nVidia 8400GS, but they are too expensive IMO (about 50% more for a PCI version compared to the more modern PCIe version). Last time I tried to help someone with a intel 8XX chipset to get a 8400GS running there was a lot of problems....how much of that was due to the guy I was trying to help, or myself, or hardware/software incompatibilities I dont know. :|

Vector, and silimar 'light' distros should help. You could probably get things running smoother if you changed to Xfce (easy to install in mint). Also, IIRC mint will try to run compositing effects, which will put strain on your video card, CPU and memory. If I'm rght and compositing is enabled, turning it off should make a different to general system performance.

*edit- 27'' HDMI? How are you hooking that up to a GF4MX, they are normally VGA only. I have seen a couple with DVI, but never HDMI.

You could have a resolution problem as well with a 27'' HDMI monitor, IIRC the GF4MX had a max resolution of 2048x1536. Some 27'' monitors have a higher resolution than that.

Wait a tic...250MHz? But your cat /proc/cpuinfo display has 292.392MHz! Looks to me like it's a cyrix MII-33GP, 75MHz FSB version, overclocked to 83MHz FSB....

@cascade9

That is right, the motherboard PC100 TXPROII M571-LMR doesn't have 100Mhz which if it was the available i could set the bios to 2,5 * 100 = 250, which 100 is the processor Cyrix MII 366 clock as well, and there is where the trick starts, the motherboard works with 83.3Mhz max frequency but can multiply per 1,5x/3,5x if i set to less than that the processor will work bellow 250MHz.
In the BIOS i did set it to work in Auto and the CPU speed to 400MHz or the trick wont happen.
So what i really have here is an overclock gaining 42.xxxMhz !!
Back in the day it was something like WOW !!!
It does work this way believe or not !!

Regards

My desktop computer is of a similar vintage, but with an NVIDIA GEForce 5200 graphics card (128MB). I have had a lot of trouble with the flashiest distros such as Ubuntu since Unity, Mint, openSUSE and Fedora.

For hardware as old as ours, I personally would use CrunchBang Linux for best performance. I would warn you that it looks really "old" and plain, and it will not look like much unless you customize it. If you are up for that kind of task, you can make CrunchBang look as nice as you like. There are samples on their forums. The nice part about CrunchBang is that it comes media-ready out of the box. You can play CDs, DVDs, MP3s, OGG sound files and other media files as soon as the installation finishes.

But since you are new, you may prefer to take a look at PCLinuxOS with Openbox first. That will give you a proper graphical operating environment that looks like a full desktop without sucking your computer's life away. It also comes media-ready. You will be able to run many of the same applications without all the overhead of the desktop eye-candy effects. When you are ready to customize your Openbox settings for a system interface that is 100% yours, you can either do it within PCLinuxOS or switch to CrunchBang to have a more minimalist starting point.

If that fails, I'd try SliTaz. SliTaz has a lightweight graphical environment, and they've selected lighter weight applications (including browsers).

I hope this helps.

Good luck!

Charles in NJ

for me your problem sounds like your pc is swapping because of not enough ram. Did you check that with gnome system monitor (like windows taskmanager) while you encounter the problems?

if its swapping, choosing a more ligthweight desktop environment could help save memory. You could also adjust the swapiness value:http://blog.zioup.org/2008/swappiness/
that should give you a few more megabytes of ram before your computer starts to swap

you don't have to switch your distro to change your desktop environment just install xfce (xfce4 (meta package in synaptic) or lxde.
see here: http://lxde.org/
and here: http://www.xfce.org/

via synaptic and choose the right environment before you login.

According to the nouveau wiki, it (NV10) is supported:

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/CodeNames
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix

I use it just fine with their driver NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.19

Thats a november 2010 release, which only works with xorg-server versions up to 1.9.X (1.8.X added with the same driver) The previous release, 96.43.18 from august 2010 only supports xorg-server up to 1.7.X.

Newer distros/releases have xorg 1.10, wich came out in march 2011. You have to use 96.43.20 from august 2011 with xorg-server version 1.10+ (and I wouldnt be suprised if the 1.11.XX xorg-server versions having trouble with the 96.43.20 drivers).

John VV might have been wrong about nVidia 'dropping suppport', but if you try to run a fairly current linux distro release with a card that uses the 96.XX.XX drivers you would have to use nouveau for at least a while. Waiting 6 months+ for nVidia to get a driver out would sure feel like support had been dropped....