Recommend A Linux Distro

[Arfie]

I have a few old computers which need an OS and it has to be legal The ideal OS for me on these types of machines was always Windows 98, but MS have withdrawn all support now and as such many providers of freeware have also withdrawn their products. I'v also run out of valid licence keys anyway, so ...

I've tried Linux many many many times before, I've had a play with Suse, Fedora, Ubuntu, DSL, Knoppix and loads of others and never had one that will install.

My latest attempt has been with gOS which I really like the look of as these machines will be mainly used for word processing/email/internet and it comes with a mac style launcher featuring direct links to Googlemail, Google docs, and open office. The Live CD runs fine on all the machines I have (all be it slow on most of them!) but once again I can't install. I've tried downloading it and burning the disk again, but it still sticks.

I always use the fully guided install method and prior to starting I wipe all partitions off the HD so it has a completely clean disk to work from.

My assuption is that the computers just aren't upto running this distro (which is based on Ubuntu 8.04), in which case can anyone recommend a distro which will run on old machines (say 500mhz processors with 256mb RAM or less). It must be free and available to burn to CD rather than DVD as most of the PC's don't have DVD drives.

If however it's something to do with setting the hard disk up, any idea's what I need to do with the partitions? I have gparted so can create, then format the partions any way they need to be.

I can do windows installs with my eyes closed, but I can't seem to get Linux working.

So, different distro? or am I doing it wrong?

Arfie

 

[andywg]

You may or may not have seen these, but it might help.

It seems Slackware is a good distro for older machines as noted in this article which also mentions Damn Small Linux and Debian (which is what Ubuntu is based on).

I used to have an issue with some distros recognising a hard drive, but that was due to no SATA support, not very likely on an old machine.

It might be worth joining a linux forum and letting them know exactly where the installs stick. Doing text based installs may provide more information than graphic based ones.

As a last thought, have you checked the hard drive(s) to make sure there aren't any errors on them?

 

[Arfie]

Cheers Andy,

I've not looked at Slackware previously, might give it a whirl. It needs to be an easy user friendly GUI when it's loaded though, hence gOS.

I have tried DSL as a live CD but I'll be buggered if I can even work out where to start trying to do a HD install

Hard drives are all fine and I can reinstall windows on them without issues.

I did wonder if there was a way to do a text based install as I thought that the GUI and install all being run from RAM could be causing issues, but I am way out of my depth with Linux so have no way of knowing where to start.

I don't know if I could take joining a computer geek forum, there's not enough time in my life with existing fora and I could lose days on something like that.

New problem this afternoon, I had an install going through on a PC but it failed, so I've deleted all partitions, though there seems to be a problem with grub loader now, I can't get rid of it (tried fixmbr & fdisk /mbr) and it's remembered that user 'arfie' was registered, now I can't even get the live cd to boot.

Arfie