Looking for a new OS.

[Tophinator]

I have come across a free older lap top. Toshiba Satellite with a pentium Celeron 500mhz 130ish FSB, 6GB HD, 192MB of Ram. Currently windows 98 is on there and I could load XP. But I would like to try a linux bases OS, something like Mandrake but free or cheap. Im mostly going to be using it for browsing the web in/during classes and stuff so I just want a OS with a nice interface, compatible with most plug ins and firefox. Also something that wont bog down the comp. like I know XP will. Any suggestions?

[Panama Red]

I've been playing with Ubuntu for a while now. I'm not totally familiar with all the plug ins and add ons but the core product is pretty complete. Uses a windows type GUI so it's easy to adapt to. You can download the installation file and burn it to a disk. Works great.

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/

[ffreeloader]

Download and burn yourself a Knoppix live CD and boot the computer with it to see how well Knoppix does with recognizing hardware. If it recognizes everything you can either install it, Debian, or one of the other Debian descendants such as Ubuntu and have pretty good luck with it. The Debian descendants all use apt-get which is far and away the best package management system, at least IMHO, so you won't have any problems updating, adding, or removing software. Debian kind of makes you learn, but the debian-user mailing list is very helpful and the Debian-reference package is pretty good documentation.

A lot of people will tell you Debian is just too hard to install but I don't buy that. I had tried, for very short times because I didn't really like them, Redhat and Mandrake. Mandrake was very buggy and Redhat's rpm system left me in rpm hell too many times. Debian really made me learn but because of that I really became fascinated with it and have been using it for more than a year now. I really like it. Software management is far easier and the selection of software is greater than other distributions. Sarge, the latest release of Debian has more than 15,000 software packages. No other free distro comes even close to it that I know of.

It's also as solid as rock. It just plain old doesn't ever crash and it runs on some pretty old hardware. I have Debian running on an old 600 mhz PIII with 512 megs of ram. That doesn't sound too impressive until you realize that it is running a full desktop gui, an Apache server, a Postgres database server, and a CUPS server all at the same time and it still isn't really slow. I've also installed it on a 300 mhz PII with 128 megs of ram. It gets slow opening large graphics files but other than that it isn't too doggy. You really don't notice the lack of cpu speed and ram until you have something that uses large amounts of ram such as very large graphics files. For surfing the net, email, documents, and the like it runs just fine.

[Tophinator]

Thanks for the info, Ill give both of those a try. Do you guys think AIM or Trillian will work on those OS's.

[kram 2.0]

I am quite sure that Trillian works only on Windows-based systems - it works fine on WinXP and Win98. Consider GAIM for Mandrake.

kram

[Tophinator]

Does Mandrake cost any money? I always thought that it was around $80 or so. But I did some searching and found some sites that have 10.1 for free??? If Mandrake is free then Ill probably just use that.

[ffreeloader]

Gaim works pretty well, and KDE comes with Kopete which also seems to do OK. Of the two Gaim is better, at least IMO. It has a few more features. Kopete works fine it just doesn't have many bells and whistles.

[bigandy]

Originally Posted by Tophinator Does Mandrake cost any money? I always thought that it was around $80 or so. But I did some searching and found some sites that have 10.1 for free??? If Mandrake is free then Ill probably just use that.

Yes, Mandrake is available for free. But you can buy it if you want. A good site for downloading Linux ISOs is, well, LinuxISO.

[Tophinator]

Thanks for the link. What do you guys think of College Linux? It looks interesting, a lot like Mandrake.

[Tophinator]

Im starting to rethink the mandrake thing. Im downloading it right now and its 3 CD ISO's. How is all that plus some other stuff going to fit on my 6GB hard drive? Windows might run slower but its only just one CD.

[glc]

You probably won't be installing everything on those 3 CD's.

[rjfvillarosa]

Like PR I have been playing with Ubuntu and I must confess I find it very easy to use, it involves a little command line work if you wish to install any third party software but it's not that difficult once you know how.

[Tophinator]

well i tried college linux, and the software was so buggy i couldnt even partition my drive. then I tried debian but I couldnt get a full version of it to install because all the servers were down. So I installed Ubuntu and so far it works great except for one thing. On the bottom right above the task bar, theres about a inch of just scrambled pixles going all the way across. It really sucks because I cant see a lot of stuff and I cant have anything maximized. Anyone know how I can fix it? I figure its either my graphics card is not up to the challenge or there is a driver conflict. Either way I would really like to get it fixed because I would like to keep this OS on here.

Also when I adjust the resolution to 600x480(small) the GUI looks fine. No glitches or anything. Is there anyway that I can tone the graphics down a little? I really hate looking at a screen that is half the size it should be.

[Ind-PC_student]

Originally Posted by Tophinator I have come across a free older lap top. Toshiba Satellite with a pentium Celeron 500mhz 130ish FSB, 6GB HD, 192MB of Ram. Currently windows 98 is on there and I could load XP. But I would like to try a linux bases OS, something like Mandrake but free or cheap. Im mostly going to be using it for browsing the web in/during classes and stuff so I just want a OS with a nice interface, compatible with most plug ins and firefox. Also something that wont bog down the comp. like I know XP will. Any suggestions?

Take a look at the forum alternative operating systems
Read the thread what is your favourite operating system
There you will find plenty of choices for you to try

so far users have been saying that mepis is the easiest to install.

[Tophinator]

I found a OS that I liked. The problem is my laptop cant handle graphics above windows 98. Its a old toshiba satellite with a 500mhz Cely. Anyone know if I can replace the graphics card?

[Auriga]

Generally you cannot replace the graphics card on older laptops.

[ffreeloader]

Did you try a Knoppix live cd? Knoppix, in my experience, has the best hardware recognition of all the Linux distro's. If it won't work then I don't know what to tell you, other than to ask this question on a board such as linuxquestions.org. It's a large forum dedicated solely to Linux with a lot of very knowledgeable Linux people. Someone there may have done what you're trying to do.