Help please
 

Hi, I just started and very green, I got a old unit that has Linux instaled. I get home start it and I get a purple screen after gnu grub screen, I'm using a diferent mouse and monitor is all that changed from when I picked it up. I don't know were to start.

Hello and welcome to LQ!

You can start off by making more sense with your sentences, and telling us what distro you are using, and the steps you have taken so far to troubleshoot your problem, and we can go from there.

Cheers,

Josh

or if you don't have any important data on that old computer, you can install a fresh distro meant for old machines and start from there.

Welcome to LQ.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...Ask_a_Question
http://linuxsilo.net/docs/smart-questions_en.html

The (unknown) word "distro" is short for distribution.
Distribution means Linux OS.

A purple screen probably means Ubuntu 10.10 ?

Yo!

An old(er) PC eh? Purple,eh? Sounds like Ubuntu (like knudfl noticed).

My two cents? You try to run a new Ubuntu on a way too old/lite machine. It does'nt hang, but has lotsalotsa trouble getting it all done.

Look into a lighter distro, may I suggest:

http://www.xubuntu.org/ - an Ubuntu with a smaller footprint
http://spins.fedoraproject.org/lxde/ - a Fedora, you may have to reinstall occasionally as the versions come in...
http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%...%20Started.htm - cute litew8 and fast

All tested on a P3/320Mb/14Gb system and ran like a train - 192Mb is big enough to make Xubuntu and Puppy very happy, and Xubuntu is a rolling release (if I'm not mistaken) that has to be installed only once, and stays fresh, as long as you keep it updated.

As you're new to Linux, a nice intro can be found here:

http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/intro-linux.pdf

By the way, this IS the Linux community, we love all sorts of details :D , so, more detail allows us (the community) to help you. What machine is it?
To find out enter this in the console:

and copy-n-paste the output or otherwise, try to read-n-figure things out like CPU, memory hard drive from the output and post these details here.

What Linux? Easy:

in the console.

Happy Linuxin'!

Thor