[blackx]

Alright,

I picked up an old system from my brother last night as he has bought a new system to replace the aging beast I've now dragged back to my place.

I've decided I should put the machine to some use if possible, and the obvious thing I thought was to use it to learn Linux, so yes, the following questions will be from a newbie!

Basically, are there any system requirements for the various distros of linux? The old beast is Pentium II (not yet sure of processor speed as I haven't fired it up). But I'll take a stab in the dark and go with 500Mhz and 128Mb RAM. Will this be sufficient?

When downloading the distro to burn to CD, I assume I need the i386 version? I think I'll go with the Mandrake distro, unless anyone has a reason I should look at something else?

So in summary:

1. Are there minimum system requirements.
2. What would be the recommended distro for an old system
3. What type of distro will be best (eg: i386)

Any help greatly appreciated!

[winblowz]

It sounds crazy, but I always recommend running an old redhat on P2s.... I ran redhat 7.2 on an old pentium 2 and it worked fine. 128 megs of ram IS the minimum ram requirement for modern GUIs. If you do a minimum... no interface-no fancy graphics you can pull off w/ less... probably 64mg... you could try running a modern os on it-but i certainly dont recommend it. I'll stick with the old redhat

[horndude]

It will be fine, even any of the new distros will work great.Even a memory hog like KDE window manager/GUI will run, just be a little sluggish.A better choice of GUI's like maybe fluxbox,icewm, or blackbox will give you fairly snappy performance.

Ive run slackware 9.1 on as little as a pentium 100 with 64mb ram, and it worked fine, just isnt as fast as a newer machine.

The older kernels are smaller and setup for what was around 10yrs ago, but the new ones can be recompiled w/o all the unecessary modules and features which helps alot.

One thing you may want to keep in mind is alot of the newer apps rely on current libraries,compiler, and in some cases the kernel too.If you install an old version of linux you may run into difficulties running newer apps.Not an unsolvable problem, but it can be frustrating.

Best distro........take your pick, there's a bunch.Redhat,Mandrake, and debian have their own styles of pkg management and usually have decent install GUI's and configuration.........very much like windows.Slackware has been my favorite for awhile, its script based/text install for the most part, some say its for experts, but it isnt too hard really, its very well documented and been around longer than most others.Most come complete with almost anything you will need, 4-6 browsers, cd burning software,3-4 music players, 2-5 file managers, 3-5 GUI/window managers....lots of options.Every networking tool you may need., they are quite complete these days.They are also quite large, a full install of most distro's these days runs around 2GB, not good on old machines with small drives.........

[SewerBeing]

go with fedora core 2. Since you said yourself you a are a linux n00b, the above options while being better performing will give you more trouble then its worth. Personally, I will suggest using Fedora Core 2, its easy to install, lots of support for it, but performance will be worse.

[blackx]

Thanks for the advice guys. I was trying to decide between Mandrake and Fedora...still am really. Might try both and see which succeeds.

I think I also sold the machine short. Once I got a chance to have a look at it I realised it was Pentium 700Mhz (Which I think is Pentium 3, not sure if 2 went that high). Bit short on RAM (128) but this can be easily and cheaply fixed. 2 CD drives (CDR and CDRW). Removable hard disk.

So the hardware is a little better than I thought, and with a small investment can be a nice little secondary machine.

I'm hoping once I get started and can see the OS in front of me, everything will start falling in place (plus I have another machine which will be online so I can reference any help I need).

Last question. Once I have the OS burnt to CD(s), and I format the machine. I assume I can boot from CD, or should I create a (floppy) boot disk?

[mdshort]

Mandrake's distro isn't it's best lately, try the fedora core.

[Mort]

Would Fedora core run smoothly on a pentium 2? I have just finished downloading it with all the the packages aswell (4GIG) and i would recommend it to any noob but i am questioning whether or not you will have problems with it on a pentium 2

[ctracer]

i have not seen anything to think otherwise as long as it is above a 400 p2 it should run with the minimum of ram