Linux Mint Forums

My sister has an emachine T1090, with a 900mhz Celeron processor and 128 megs ram (yikes). She was crawling with Win XP and a highly fragmented hard drive (30%). I talked her into trying linux since, even if I defragment her drive, she is still going to crawl with XP. I put the live CD in (gnome-Elyssa) and and to my dismay, it wouldn't boot all the way. After a few mintutes it starts to load the desktop, and then freezes when it gets to the crash screen (the one that sometimes comes up on the live CD). Once it showed the words on the crash window but most of the time it was just a white box on a blank destop. I tried pressing ctrl-alt-backspace, to no avail. I ended up tucking my tale and doing a clean install of XP, to get rid of all the crap she never uses that came pre-installed on her pc but I would have preferred Mint.

After all that, my question is can Mint run on her system - 128 megs ram, and 900mhz Celeron? Is there a non graphical installation that I could do? She also has a Vista laptop that will need to share her printer (Lexmark 2600 series) through the network.

big_dog1968,

128 MB is cutting it pretty thin. You need between 256 and 384 MB to get it to install.

What you can do is download the latest stable version of Gparted live cd iso from the link below and make a swap partition of 512 MB before you try to run the Mint cd. It will install slow but it will install. Don't expect the installed system to be fast though. In fact it will be quite slow. Probably not as slow as XP but slow for Linux.

You might want to try one of the less demanding Mint versions. Not Gnome or KDE.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... _id=271779

Fred

Have you tried XFCE or Fluxbox mint versions? Is one or the other better for a limited machine like hers?

Have you heard of Zen linux? I heard that was a good one for older pc's like my sister has.

Thanks Fred.

Exploder mentioned AntiX a while back in a thread. It is based on Mepis, and might work just fine on the hardware you have. If you check http://antix.mepis.org/index.php/Main_Page , you can see if AntiX might be what you need. In my testing of AntiX, everything with which I fiddled on the Live CD worked great. Their forum is similar to this one with a small and helpful community. AntiX is worth your time to look into.

I agree that 128 MB of RAM is going to be the problem with running Mint. I know Mint Xcfe will run great on a machine with 256 MB of RAM, but I have not tried it on a machine with 128 MB. You might have a go at it just for verification purposes. If you could run across another 128 MB stick of RAM someplace, the whole experience would be better.

The Mint Fluxbox version looks interesting, but I have not tried it yet. That is also an avenue to explore.

Good luck, and please post back with your results. Have fun!