I have a friend who copied his entire music library onto my 160gb external drive. He used Suse 9.1. He recommended that I pick up a cheap, used PC that I'll strictly use for transferring tunes onto my Neuros Digital Audio Computer (highly recommend the Neuros, btw....it's open source and works great). I have an old HP Pavilion 4533 with a 6gb hard drive, no O/S and AMD K6-2 450ghz processor. A dinosaur, I know. It only has 96 meg, but I'm going to upgrade it to 192. It works fine, with the exception of the USB ports. They're integrated on the board, but are inoperable for some reason. My questions are:

a. With an upgrade to 192 meg and given the processor speed, will Suse 9.1 work sufficiently?

b. Will a standard 2-port USB 2.0 PCI card work on this older machine with 9.1 installed?

Keep in mind that I'm only using the PC for transferring music and nothing else.

Appreciate the help!!

Welcome to LQ!

That processor speed and amount of RAM will probably work, but it won't be blazing fast, and you may want to go with a light weight desktop environment (in other words, *not* KDE or Gnome which are resource-intensive) It's a harder call on the USB 2.0 card, but again it probably would be OK.

Rather than to spend money on the card though, I'd suggest using a Live CD such as Knoppix, which you can download from LinuxISO. A Live CD is basically a fully functional "Linux system on a CD", and all you need to do to get up and running under Linux is to burn the CD, put it into the drive, then reboot (make sure your BIOS sequence looks at the CD first) Knoppix has excellent hardware detection capabilities, and may be able to get those existing USB ports working. Good luck with it -- J.W.

I would say go with the SuSE install... I'm sure you are aware that is wont be super-fast... but it will work just the same... I have an old e-machine with a 466MHz Celeron and 256 MB of RAM after upgrade.... It had a single 4 GB HD and I added another 6 GB disk... I have SuSE 9.1 running okay on it... again... It's not fast... but it'll get the job done... and KDE is a nice, newbie friendly interface... you can always switch to XFCE or IceWM later... Good Luck

Thanks to all who've replied!

You could always use a more lightweight distro:

I would suggest Slackware 10 with only the minimum crap running.

Ideally I'd suggest DeliLinux, but I don't know if it has the support you need (it uses an OLD kernel )

My buddy says that I have to use Suse. I have Xandros and he said it wouldn't work with Xandros.