Linux distribution for old hardware
I have a question, Which distro and version of distro is the best for newbies and has games on it, but doesnt take up alot of Harddrive space. Im building a desktop pc that wilhave a Intel celerion cpu in it,and has 256mb-356mb of ram in it. please respond ASAP.
#1 24jeffgordonfan |
Hello #1_24jeffgordonfan, welcome to LQ,
this question is not urgent for anyone of us. Please use Google and come back if you've found some basic information by yourself. Please note that you will have more luck with your posts here at LQ if you use a descriptive Thread-title. BTW: take a look at distrowatch.com http://distrowatch.com/ Markus EDIT: the OP has changed the threadtitle, so I've changed my post as well ;) |
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For a system with less than 512 MB of RAM, I recommend Puppy Linux; perhaps the latest Wary build. Not sure what games are available for it, though.
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Hi,
I think you can use many distributions, but not those with a big desktopenvironment like KDE or Gnome. My experience is that Slackware as well as Arch (as an example) will run properly on the machine, I would recommend to install Fluxbox or Fvwm as a Windowmanager. The problem is gaming. I don't think that the most games will run properly on such slow hardware. Could you please specify which games you want to install? Markus |
So you need a lightweight distro for newbies. I would recommend antiX or Bhodi. Of course you can also use one of the bigger distros with a lightweight environment, like Debian (with XFCE or LXDE), Lubuntu or Xubuntu or PCLinuxOS (with Enlightenment or LXDE). Slackware will also be good for such a machine but isn't really for newbies.
As mentioned above, such a machine isn't really for gaming, but if you limit that to older or simpler games you should be fine. Keep in mind that you also need a 3D video card for some games. |
It is very simple. Look for the earlier version of the recent distributions. Now we have Ubuntu 10.... - you may try Ubuntu 8.1.
The Celeron is a 2003 year processor - each distro released between 2004-2007(8) should be fine. What kind of games do you want to play on Celeron? It's ridiculous. On my Pentium 150 Mhz with 256 MB RAM, voodoo rush 8MB video card, asl100 sound card, I was using Slackware 9.1. Games? Oh, yeah - kmahjong. But I was able to watch movies on VCD disks with xine (forget Mplayer), listening to music with alsa system (it was the time when alsa appeared - as I remeber as a part of the XFree86 project - I regret it was dropped from Linux distros - at the time it was much better than Xorg X Window server. Maybe I should go back? I am very displeased the way Linux is developed nowadays. In the past the system was clean, each part has it's own place - X window had it's own directory tree, kde under opt/, Gnome easy to maintain. One I had learn simple rules I was able to maintain the system myself. Today everything is messed up. Looking at /usr/bin makes me to feel a great pain. The developers made me to feel like a dumb. Linux is more and more windowzee. But windowzee has an advantage - you can play games on it. The dead end. |
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at the very beginning. I am sure you don't try to tell that Ubuntu 8.1 is unsecure. Many are still using it. It suits better for old hardware than new versions. But nevermind - Ubuntu was only an example. Quote:
I cannot even imagine a hardware configuration to play Crysis on Linux. Wine is great - on a great computer. Quote:
an older version of Linux. |
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There are games you can play on old systems like that. Not all games require 32MB+ GPUs with hardware T&L.... You also dont need a 2004-2008 distro to run on 'older' hardware. |
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I would recommend AntiX. It's a Mepis based distro which in turn is based directly around Debian, so you'll have a very large repository of thousands upon thousands of packages. You have to be careful though because it's really easy to get it bloated by installing things that require QT and things with lots of dependencies. I have it running on my old dell and its running great.
I wouldn't recommend Puppy... as far as I'm aware (I could be wrong) it logs you in as root which is bad plus puppy is a pain to use in my experiance. I wasn't much of a fan of Bodhi either... I really don't like E17. Anyways good luck. |
Whichever distro you try, for games on older hardware you can have many hours of fun with various 8bit emulators like VICE, ZSNES, Atari800 and Spectemu. Lubuntu should run well on those specs, I think.
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