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

Don't tell us to hurry up..we volunteer our time here. And if you're building a system that you want use graphically (i.e. GUI, with games, etc), you need a better CPU and more memory. There are versions that can fit on a smaller machine...but they sure won't be for gaming.

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.

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.

Sorry, but bad advice. Ubuntu 8.10 is unsupported, so actually you recommended to a newbie to use a system that gets no bugfixes and security updates, and it is nearly impossible (at least for a newbie) to install software on it.

No, it is not, there are plenty of games that you can play with that machine. Of course it won't run Crysis 2 or something similar, but you can play games with it.

If you want to rant about the direction in which Linux heads make your own thread for that, this is not the place for that.

Developers really don't care about old hardware. For most of them an old hardware is the Pentium Dual Core or Core Duo
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.

It is simply untrue. I tried many games - those with more sophisticated graphic heavily rely on a hardware support for OpenGl.
I cannot even imagine a hardware configuration to play Crysis on Linux. Wine is great - on a great computer.

The question was about a system for an old hardware. I have made remarks concerning the differences - what to expect installing
an older version of Linux.

Celerons date back to 1998.

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.

That may be true for Ubuntu or other bleeding-edge distros, but there are distros specifically aimed at older hardware, for example ConnochaetOS, and there are distros (like Slackware) that still support very old versions with security fixes.

Yes, that is what I am saying. 8.10 is EOL since April 2010, that means that every security hole in the software on that system that was found after that date has not been fixed and never will be. That is exactly the definition of insecure.

Which is done mostly by the graphics hardware, not the processor. By the way, if you limit yourself to older games you will have no problems with that hardware, Quake 3 is still a good game, UT2004 also.

Informing yourself is better than just to (not) imagine something: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManage...sion&iId=13890, http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManage...sion&iId=23103

No, you where not, you were just ranting how everything is messed up nowadays, and how it makes you feel like a dumb.

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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