OT - which distro?

[dogscoff]

Baron, I will eventually be posting a webpage detailing exactly what I did and how, so that other potential Linux users with similar hardware can see what's possible. The link will be http://www.dogscoff.co.uk/linux but I don't have anything up there just yet.

In the end I went for Full Ubuntu 7.04 on the Dell Inspiron 510m (just google for specs). It installed fine, picked up all the hardware, no further tweaking required whatsoever. It even runs the desktop effects nicely.

The machine that's making things interesting is a battered-but-functioning Sony Vaio fx701. Specs here. It's a good little machine, designed to run WinXP home which it did, well enough, for some five or six years.

Anyway, I installed Xubuntu on the Sony from the alternate install CD. Full Ubuntu was just too much for it. Xubuntu's install picked up all the hardware without any hassle at all, including the Sitecom WN PCC 01 wireless network card in the PCMCIA slot, so I was online straight away. I've removed abiword and installed openoffice and everything seems to run just fine. Admittedly, all I've used it for so far is browsing, viewing photos, checking email and playing Wesnoth. However the hardware seems to be entirely up to the job. Oh, I also had a quick play with LinCity, which seemed to be a little bit laggy, but I have a suspicion it runs like that on most computers.

There have been a few niggling things to sort out, some of them my own fault, I'm sure (keyboard mappings, transferring emails, that kind of stuff) which will be documented in full on my website.

I haven't played with Puppy or DSL yet, I'm afraid. They both seem to offer day-to-day use desktop systems though. Take a look at their websites for screenshots and software lists:

http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=1 (hit 'refresh' if it comes up with "page not found."

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

I'm tempted to spend £10 on a USB memory stick and put Puppy on there, just so I can play with it. If I do, I will report back. I don't think I'll be using DSL unless I do one day decide to unmothball my old Toshiba.

Is your machine home-built/custom built or is factory built? What exactly are the specs?

[Baron Munchausen]

Oh, it's definitely a homebrew. I replaced the contents of an old 386 "baby AT" case with parts that I bought on eBay. It's an Asus T2P4 motherboard, one of the most highly regarded boards of that generation. The level 2 cache was still on the motherboard at that time, and normally a Pentium MMX 233 would be the fastest CPU for this board. BUT... AMD produced the compatible K6-2 series with a special multiplier so you could get 6X with the 2X jumper settings. This gives me what is essentially a Pentium II system at 400 Mhz, but still with only 256 MB of ordinary DRAM (only the level 2 cache is SDRAM). Thanks to the long-unchanged standard for IDE it's got a relatively modern 15 Gb HD attached. And a Matrox G200 video card which is quite fast at 2D display just waaaay behind the 3D revolution. Currently I've got Fedora 6 running XFCE on it, which is serviceable but often slow. Unfortunately, Fedora 7 is not available on CD anymore, only DVD. I'm not buying a DVD drive for this ancient system, even if it might work. So I'm thinking about what other distros to use to keep it relatively up-to-date. Xubuntu sounds like a good candidate but the full CD image is a bit much to download -- it'll have to be mailorder for that. I also downloaded Puppy Linux 2.17.1 via bittorrent (only 100 MB) and plan to try it out soon.

[dogscoff]

OIC.

How big is this killer Fedora7 download? Couldn't you order the DVD, get a friend with a more modern machine to transfer the installer from DVD to a huge USB flash drive or external hard drive? Might set you back a few $$$ for a stick that size or a hard dive, but it would be something you could get good use out of afterwards, even when you get a new PC.

Alternately, would it be possible to take your PC to a friend's house/ local friendly PC shop and transfer the DVD across a network?

I'd be happy to nip round with my laptop so we could transfer the files by ethernet. Just supply the return flight tickets to Ohio and I'll be right over=-)

[Baron Munchausen]

I haven't even bothered to look at how big Fedora 7 is. A single CD is a huge problem to download when you're on dialup. A DVD is unthinkable. As far as I know, all of the major distros do have 'network' install capabilities. So I suppose I could put a cheap network car in this machine and possibly install from another machine with a DVD drive. Even that might be more trouble than it's worth. Puppy Linux might be just the thing to make this machine usable for a few more years as a 'backup'. Every thing I currently own is quickly becoming obsolete as the PCI-X bus and multi-core CPUs spread. Looks like it'll be time to buy a new multi-core machine soon. Then I can run SUSE with its default multi-processor enabled kernel.