Min specs for Linux??

a13antichrist

a13antichrist

Moderator from Hell
Have the option of picking up a P133 pretty cheaply.. if I did I would throw Linux on it to have a play around.. is this going to be enough?? :)
 
This would be enough for Mandrake 7.x or Redhat 6.x with kde desktop. Do not expect to run a gui such as kde2 on that machine with any great performance. You will also need at least 1gb of hard-drive space and 32mb of ram. If you want to run in command line mode, then a 386 with a few 100 megabytes of hard-drive space and 8mb of ram could let you learn Linux.
 
glussier about sumed it up for ya. :) Another thing to be a little cautious about it the video card. You may have a bit of trouble with video cards and the older distro's, but there are quite a few that are supported. Just let it probe the card during the install. If you don't like the res it wants to put you in, you can always decide on something you like and the card will take.
 
Hmm I doubt very much I'd be using the command-line mode.. it's gonna have 32Mb, a 2Gb drive, not sure of video.. think 16Mb something.. although that sounds funny..

It's gonna be running on a 14" that screws up above 640x480 anyway so won't matter too much if I can't get higher res'. :)
 
I ran RedHat 6.1 and Mandrake 7.1 on a P200 with 64MB and 2GB hard disk in GUI mode just fine. I agree that the newer distros with KDE2 will dog. I would recommend Mandrake 7.1 because it is very forgiving re: hardware. Note: I always install GUI I/F and usually all the goodies which takes about 1.3GB on the disk but have done it as small as 700MB.
 
OKay, I have the system now. On-board 4Mb S3 Virge video, on-board sound. 32Mb SDRAM but got a couple of spare slots. :)

So the question now is, which one?? Mandrake or Red Hat?? Or what?? :)
 
I would start with Mandrake as it is very friendly to the new user. A good distro to learn with.
 
That's my vote, I love it. It was the first distro that I did not have to manually mount removable media drives to use them.

7.1 would be my choice. 7.2 was a crappy release and the first one which included KDE2.
 
The onboard sound can be tricky. You will probably have to play with it some to get it to work. One good thing about dual booting is that you can boot into windows to identify IRQ's, I/O's and DMA's which may be helpful in setting it up.
 
The BIOS "might" have this information. Some can be adjusted, but most cannot. Most just allow you to turn the thing on and off...
 
Hmmm it won't be dual booting - just straight Linux. I'm putting Win98 on it at the moment just to get it started so I guess I'll note the IRQs & things while I'm there. Do I need to do that though?? Doesn't it do that for ya anymore??? Damn.. :)
 
It should see and work with the hardware accordingly. The big thing is using IRQ's for devices that are somewhat standard. Such as using IRQ 5 for sound and not 7 or 9.
 
If your sound card is not automatically detected, press <Ctrl> <Alt> <Backspace> to exit KDE OR GNOME (or wathever), and type sndconfig and let this program detect/configure the soundcard for you. Type startx to go back in kde or gnome or etc.
 
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