Thinking of installing Ubuntu 5.04 or 5.10
 

Hi,

I've got an old Pentium II IBM Thinkpad 600. As a faithful Slackware user, I don't know much about past versions of Ubuntu but want to give it a try as it seems to be what a lot of people I know are using.

The thing is, installation of the current version is taking a heck of a long time. I know that version 5 is now unsupported but will I be able to do most of the standard word processing, internet browsing, HAM radio CAT control on it e.t.c. that I do on other machines.

Is this a good or a bad idea? The only reason that I am thinking of installing the previous version is because I think it will be much less heavy on system resources. Would version 6.10 be more suitable?

Thanks very much,

Matt. I

Older versions are not necessarily going to run any better than newer versions. Linux systems don't really have that linear system resource progression that Windows does. Using an old version of Ubuntu is just going to get you outdated software and less functionality, at very little to no performance increase.

You are much better off using the latest Xubuntu or even Fluxbuntu. These give you the core functionality and capability of the Ubuntu system, but strip out the relatively bloated GNOME/KDE environments in place of XFCE and FluxBox, respectively. This will give you a much larger performance boost than simply using an older version of GNOME.

You won't find resources particularly different across any version of Ubuntu. It's what you do with it that counts.

One of the best things about Ubuntu is the community which for the most part is using recent versions. There are lots of small improvements and hardware support you will miss out on in addition to being out of step with the community. Chances are you have less memory than newer systems and would probably be better off with Xubuntu.

I have an old TP 600E with a PII 366 and 288MB ram with dapper installed and it works fine for most routine tasks. (playing a flash video in firefox is one exception I can think of offhand, it's pretty choppy). As a matter of fact, I recall seeing a website with some helpful info for just this setup. You will need to do some tweaking of various modprobe.d files to get sound working and set the default video depth to 16 in your xorg.conf. Do a google search on something like "linux dapper thinkpad 600E" and you should find what you need pretty easily.

On this same machine, I have run 8.04 from the live cd but not installed. I didn't try to install it permanently, as I'm still sorting out the 8.04 installation on may main system!

I have an old TP 600E with a PII 366 and 288MB ram with dapper installed and it works fine for most routine tasks. (playing a flash video in firefox is one exception I can think of offhand, it's pretty choppy). As a matter of fact, I recall seeing a website with some helpful info for just this setup. You will need to do some tweaking of various modprobe.d files to get sound working and set the default video depth to 16 in your xorg.conf. Do a google search on something like "linux dapper thinkpad 600E" and you should find what you need pretty easily.

On this same machine, I have run 8.04 from the live cd but not installed. I didn't try to install it permanently, as I'm still sorting out the 8.04 installation on my main system!

I agree with installing an older version of ubuntu is silly, If xubuntu doesnt work for you, then you can try installing dsl (damm small linux), its got all that u want, but if u really want the latest core then u can get dsl-n, which got the 2.6 core (dsl got the 2.4 core), dsl-n isnt very stable though, they say its still in development stages. Here is a nice wiki for installing ubuntu on low memory systems : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...wMemorySystems