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which linux version to use with and older computer

I would like to learn how to use linux on my older computer which has a 1.2GHz AMD Athlon 200FSB. Which linux version would be best to use?

That's not old enough to be an issue on any distrobution.

Essentially every distribution can work well on a system like that. Your choice of distribution would be best informed by your intended use. Personal use as a desktop versus business use as a workstation or server might make a fair difference.

My old 1 ghz Athlon will run anything. Mind you, I have lots of ram.

MiniMe, Sam, TinyMe, Vector, Puppy, Mepis AntiX, DSL, and Goblin will fly on that old machine.

I've been playing with Puppy 4 (Opera version) and have been blown away by the network wizard. Wireless support at its best in a 85 mb distro. Why can't the big boys do this?

TinyMe is hard to beat as well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kf6zqq (Post 3164103)

I would like to learn how to use linux on my older computer which has a 1.2GHz AMD Athlon 200FSB. Which linux version would be best to use?

As others have already said, pretty much anything will work on that CPU. I myself have a 1.2Ghz Athlon right now, running Ubuntu 7.10 just fine. I haven't tried Ubuntu 8.04 on it yet, but I suspect it might even run better with 8.04 from what I've heard.

Code:

win32sux@candystore:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo 

processor      : 0

vendor_id      : AuthenticAMD

cpu family      : 6

model          : 4

model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) Processor

stepping        : 2

cpu MHz        : 1194.986

cache size      : 256 KB

fdiv_bug        : no

hlt_bug        : no

f00f_bug        : no

coma_bug        : no

fpu            : yes

fpu_exception  : yes

cpuid level    : 1

wp              : yes

flags          : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow up

bogomips        : 2391.34

clflush size    : 32

Granted, I will most likely move up to something like a 1.8Ghz Intel Celeron (with twice as much cache as this Athlon) before New Year, cuz even though this box runs okay, I'm starting to want something a little zippier - regardless of distro. I've had this box since like 2002 and it's been real good to me. It's run Red Hat, Mandrake, Fedora, Slackware, Debian, and for the past couple years it's settled on Ubuntu. So I can tell you from experience that you don't need to limit yourself to specialty distros (designed for old hardware) with this CPU. That said, your amount of RAM might make light window managers something to consider. I've got just 512MB RAM and use Ubuntu's stock GNOME without any complaints. With less RAM I might have had to opt for something like XFCE or IceWM or Fluxbox or whatever instead of GNOME.

If your goal is to "learn Linux" then I would go with Slackware and don't use a gui. I started with Slack 10.2 for an apache web server and really learned a lot about the OS. They're website also has a great book for getting started that is an easy read. http://www.slackbook.org/