New linux user, older computer... which version should i use?
 

I am new to linux and have never installed it before. I am planning on dual booting it with an existing windows xp pro laptop machine. the laptop is an older hp pavilion ze4300 (1.5 ghz single core, 512 physical ram) and was wondering what version of red hat i should install on this older laptop to make it run decent. im sure a linux OS designed for a quad core 4 gb system is not what i need. Also, where can i goto download the .iso for this version? thanks in advance

Hello, what is about
XUBUNTU.ORG

In my opinion, the most heavy components are the desktop environment packages , when you are able work without an actual kde or gnome then a lot of problems not occur....
Take a look at icewm or XFCE (preinstalled in xubuntu)
This means not that you can't use kde or gnome components, you can start a krusader or kword in a icewm session, and this is not a problem on a 300 MHZ machine...

Good Luck, Randolf Balasus

poolboy83

With 512(more is always better) you can run any version you like. If you actually want to run RH itself, understand that they are subscription only (pay to play).

You can run Fedora which is the community development branch that the next version(s) of RH come from, but be aware that Fedora only supports any one version for 13months. After that you either install a newer version (clean installs are still officially suggested) or live without updates of any kind. Fedora is also considered to be bleeding edge. It will have all the latests and greatest features, but it will also have a significant number of bugs. Fedora 11 is due to be released shortly(May?).

Centos is RHEL(Red Hat Enterprise Linux) with the logos removed. It is binary compatible with RHEL(built from same source) and is free to download/update. They have a five year(plus) support life. Centos/RHEL are enterprise products so they will be extremely stable (bug free as compared to Fedora), but will NOT have all the latest and greatest features. Current version of RHEL/Centos is 5.3 .

Well, you mentioned Red Hat. Could you write a little bit more about what you are going to do on your linux machine, what expectations do you have from your distro? Maybe the community here can choose a different linux for you, that better suits you?

FWIW- Just for fun, I installed Ubuntu & Kubuntu 8.04 on a P3-733MHz w/384Mb RAM. While it was a little slow booting and loading apps, everything else worked just fine. Even streaming video quality was perfect. Don't see why you can't run whatever you want on your machine.

Cheers

i am planning on running asterisk (for VOIP) on my main server computer. I am trying to learn Linux before i install it that way i know the basic commands. right now since it is a laptop i want a basic linux machine to dual boot with windows XP pro. maybe a machine that can run "aircrack" but primarily just a machine to learn the basic commands on. thanks for your help in advance. i have a wireless Card to pick up network connections for aircrack and have the program itself.

Tim

You should be able to run virtually any current version of linux to do what you are thinking of. The chipset of the wireless card may be a sticking point. Hopefully it is a natively supported card (some are, some are not), but before you choose make certain that your card is supported. You can make almost any card work with any distro but some cards on some distros can be a lot of work. Over the last couple of years this has vastly improved, but it is still something to watch for.

You may want to look at live cds. These are versions that you can take for a "test drive"(from the CD) without having to install them. Most distros now have a liveCD version. Basically try a few and see which ones "feel" right to you. A lot of us get 6 months to a year down the road then switch distros and many continually test drive new distros or versions (dual boot or tri boot). While the details do change from distro/version to distro/version the basic concepts are there in virtually all of them. In short, do not be afraid to look at other distros if your current one is not quite meeting your needs.

You can just install any contemporary version of any leading distribution. The main point for older hardware is to avoid resource-hungry desktop environments (rather use fluxbox, XFCE or WindowMaker) and also avoid installing software that requires new hardware.

You can install even the most recent Fedora version - by only selecting the relevant packages to be installed.