Suggested versions for old Dell

[Summersky]

I have 2, 9 year old dell dimension 2400 desktop pcs. Dell must have sold millions of these things. They both have intel pentium 4 processors and 1 g of memory. One has a 40 g hhd and the other has 80. They have both been running Mint 10, Julia, happily for over a year, but time to move on, so..
I tried Mint 12 in one of them, but the top toolbar doesnt show. Should I try to correct that, or is there a different version of Mint that will run better on these old clunkers? I have 12 in a netbook and love it. The old laptop is running 9, Isadora very well and I will probably leave it until it is no longer supported. I was wondering if KDE or Xfce would be better choices for the antique dells.

Thanks to all, and especially to the Mint team for this excellent OS.

edit: Also, I believe that Dell has a bios update for these machines that requires internet explorer. Is it possible or advisable to try to do this update through WINE?

[mank_in]

Do you know your graphic adapter intel 845G
LM12 Gnome default desktop is MGSE ( gnome shell), gnome shell required modern 3d acceleration graphic card. But MATE will works. Maybe you can try LM12 LXDE

[Summersky]

Do you know your graphic adapter intel 845G
LM12 Gnome default desktop is MGSE ( gnome shell), gnome shell required modern 3d acceleration graphic card. But MATE will works. Maybe you can try LM12 LXDE

Intel 82845G/GL Nothing modern here, (one of them has a 3.5 inch floppy drive), so very doubtful about 3d acceleration. Is that why the top toolbar is invisible? I'll download LXDE and give it a try. Thanks!

[mank_in]

About BIOS update:
If you don't have problem with current BIOS, i strongly not recommend update your BIOS.

Luckily i can find old Mainboard with intel 845G, intel P4 2,6 Ghz , DDR 512MB and 40 GB Harddrive, and try install LM12 LXDE on that system my self:

Code: Select all

$ inxi -F
System:    Host asbun-845GV Kernel 3.0.0-12-generic i686 (32 bit) Desktop LXDE (Openbox 3.5.0) Distro Linux Mint 12 LXDE
Machine:   Mobo eSys model 845GV version 5.0A Bios American Megatrends version Version 07.00T date 04/02/01
CPU:       Single core Intel Pentium 4 CPU (-UP-) cache 512 KB flags (sse sse2) clocked at 2265.229 MHz
Graphics:  Card: Intel 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device
           X.Org 1.10.4 drivers intel unloaded: fbdev,vesa Resolution 1024x768@60.0hz
           GLX Renderer Mesa DRI Intel 845G x86/MMX/SSE2 GLX Version 1.3 Mesa 7.11
Audio:     Card Intel 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller driver Intel ICH Sound: ALSA v: 1.0.24
Network:   Card Realtek RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ driver 8139too
           IF: eth0 state: down speed: 10 Mbps duplex: half mac: 00:11:5b:aa:c5:9a
Drives:    HDD Total Size: 48.0GB (18.8% used) 1: /dev/sda ST340014A 40.0GB
           2: USB /dev/sdc DataTraveler_G2 8.0GB
Partition: ID:/ size: 18G used: 2.7G (17%) fs: ext4 ID:swap-1 size: 1.01GB used: 0.04GB (4%) fs: swap
Sensors:   Error: You do not have the sensors app installed.
Info:      Processes 109 Uptime 15 min Memory 119.4/488.5MB Client Shell inxi 1.7.7


When idle the system take little RAM (77.3 MB ) . Note : gnome-system-monitor it self take around 7 MB RAM



VLC player works fine. Firefox a little slow, and check it when you are open website with flash animation like http://www.linuxmint.com ( very slow )
Epiphany browser and Opera much better and take less RAM.

Note : LM13 will have separate Cinnamon and MATE edition. I think MATE will works on your system.

[Summersky]

Wow. You found one! If nothing else, they are hardy.

Thank you for testing it. LXDE 12 is downloading now. I'll let you know how it goes. And now Im looking forward to 13. It would be great if it would run in these old pcs.

[Summersky]

Beautiful. Fast. Easy. Firefox is doing okay. Havent tried opera yet. Going to spend awhile experimenting.

Thanks again!

[pcdoctor]

For older PCs, I always use seamonkey and google chrome.

[Summersky]

Fortunately, the memory in both machines has been updated to 1g. Still working from the cd, Firefox is running ok, though I will keep seamonkey in mind if it gets slow. I've never liked chrome and lately, Im trying to back out of the googleverse.

One of the computers is usually offline and needs an office suite, so Im looking forward to trying libre office. It's also connected to the stereo for music. The other machine is primarily for online activities and photos. I love Gimp.

Essentially, though, these two machines give me the opportunity to explore and learn about open source and linux. After years of babysitting mswindows machines, this is very liberating and makes the computer a joy again, rather than a chore. Now when my friends and family come to me with their screwed up windows machines, I shake my head and say I dont keep up with all that stuff any more and offer a Mint cd. So far, no one has taken me up on the offer. The only people who understand this freedom are my friends on macs.

[mank_in]

Actually a PC with intel 845G is my customer PC ( i am PC repairman) . Sometime i try install linux mint on different machine just to fill my curiosity. But in my country , it very difficult to convert someone to use linux ( software piracy is very high ).

BTW, you can install libre office or anything in synaptic package manager offline. Check this : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1458199

[cjwelborn]

I have a similar PC, that is an old one. At first I was using Linux Mint 9 XFCE Edition because I know the XFCE desktop runs very well on old computers, and I read about Linux Mint 9 being very stable. Well it was, and is. I loved Linux Mint 9 because it ran 'out of the box' with no problems what so ever on this old PC, and would have kept using it if it weren't for my curiousity and need to try new things. I recently decided to do an expirement and try to run the newest Linux Mint XFCE Edition (Linux Mint 13 "Maya" XFCE Edition) on this old hardware, and all I can say right now is that I've been running it for a few days now and it works perfectly. There was only two little hiccups with the setup, I got a "dconf" error during the install which was fixed by removing the 'ubiquity-slideshow-mint' package from the LiveCD and then installing. This was a Ubuntu error, that carried over to Linux Mint, i know because I had tryed to install Ubuntu previously. The other error was with my video card, not really Linux Mint's fault. My hardware is so old and Maya uses the new Xorg so it needed to be manually configured before it would work. I basically ran the Puppy-Linux distro and copied the Device Sections from '/etc/X11/xorg.conf' and then pasted them into Maya's '/etc/X11/xorg.conf'. Anyway, this old machine is actually running Linux Mint 13 XFCE Edition with no problems now. It's awesome. I never thought it would actually work, but it does. So my advice to you is try using Linux Mint 9 XFCE Edition, which should run like a dream. Or you can try the new XFCE Edition and maybe have to do some configuration. Either way, Linux Mint is awesome for old PC's.

My Setup:
.............CPU: Intel Celeron 1Ghz
.............RAM: 1GB
....Video Card: ATI Radeon 7000 (128Mb)
............Distro: Linux Mint 13 "Maya" (XFCE Edition)