Old Compaq

Inotamira Orani · Post by **Inotamira Orani** » Tue Jun 14, 2011 2:24 pm

I haven an old Compaq that has 384 MB of ram, ATI Radeon 9250 graphics card, 900MHZ AMD Single core processor and an abysmal 20 GB hardrive. Which version of LM would be best to install on this machine or should i stick with XP?

The-Wizard · Post by **The-Wizard** » Tue Jun 14, 2011 2:40 pm

ram is a bit tight, processor speed looks ok and 20gb hard-drive is a luxury compared to my 6gb ssd on this my net-book, so i would recommend you try the same distro i am running on here... Mint LXDE

wizard

nunol · Post by **nunol** » Tue Jun 14, 2011 2:43 pm

Well, you should use a light weight Mint edition:
- Mint 9 LTS Fluxbox
- Mint 10 LXDE
- Mint XFCE (Debian testing based)
There are other versions available.

Because you only have 384MB make sure you setup a SWAP partition. If you don't know what edition to chose go for Mint 10 LXDE.

rob2uk · Post by **rob2uk** » Tue Jun 14, 2011 2:44 pm

Or you could go even lighter

Inotamira Orani · Post by **Inotamira Orani** » Tue Jun 14, 2011 2:52 pm

Thank you, how large should i make the swap partition?

rob2uk · Post by **rob2uk** » Tue Jun 14, 2011 2:59 pm

Usually 2.5 times the size of your RAM, so in your case, 960MB.

Inotamira Orani · Post by **Inotamira Orani** » Tue Jun 14, 2011 3:02 pm

How customizable is LXDE, I like to change pretty much everything aesthetically on any Linux system i have, how kind, or easy is it when it comes to making those kinds of changes

nunol · Post by **nunol** » Tue Jun 14, 2011 3:17 pm

Inotamira Orani wrote:How customizable is LXDE, I like to change pretty much everything aesthetically on any Linux system i have, how kind, or easy is it when it comes to making those kinds of changes

Not much... but give it a chance.

LXDE is a simple light weight desktop, if you want something with more features you need to get into XFCE or GNOME. Mint 11 with GNOME installs and runs with 384MB of RAM if you setup the SWAP partition, you can use the "only-ubiquity" boot option to speedup the installation but XFCE is better for that computer.

Inotamira Orani · Post by **Inotamira Orani** » Tue Jun 14, 2011 3:27 pm

Ok, last question, when i put ubuntu on this computer it was incapable of finding the driver for my graphics card.

Would LM be capable of finding it, if not, where would i go to get it and how would i install it?

nunol · Post by **nunol** » Tue Jun 14, 2011 3:32 pm

Hardware Drivers (jockey-gtk) is native to Ubuntu and should work on Mint if the distro is Ubuntu based but not on Debian based Mint.

Inotamira Orani · Post by **Inotamira Orani** » Tue Jun 14, 2011 3:49 pm

nunol wrote:Hardware Drivers (jockey-gtk) is native to Ubuntu and should work on Mint if the distro is Ubuntu based but not on Debian based Mint.

So it would work in LXDE?

Inotamira Orani · Post by **Inotamira Orani** » Tue Jun 14, 2011 11:33 pm

Ok so now i have a new problem, the bios (and no their isn't an update that i can find) doesn't support booting to usb and i have no cd-rs I'm willing to do whatever i may need to to get it to install , i don't have the space for the inside windows installation so the proper is needed.

I have plenty of flash drives and the like to do this, and i've been tampering with grub4dos for quite a few hours trying to get it to boot into the flash drive I've partitioned with unetbootin to no avail, if anyone knows how to get it to work, please let me know as I've been googleing and tampering for hours...

rob2uk · Post by **rob2uk** » Wed Jun 15, 2011 2:57 am

Inotamira Orani wrote:Ok so now i have a new problem, the bios (and no their isn't an update that i can find) doesn't support booting to usb and i have no cd-rs I'm willing to do whatever i may need to to get it to install , i don't have the space for the inside windows installation so the proper is needed.

I have plenty of flash drives and the like to do this, and i've been tampering with grub4dos for quite a few hours trying to get it to boot into the flash drive I've partitioned with unetbootin to no avail, if anyone knows how to get it to work, please let me know as I've been googleing and tampering for hours...

If the laptop is too old to boot from USB, it's too old to boot from USB. It's as simple as that. GRUB4DOS won't help.

nunol · Post by **nunol** » Wed Jun 15, 2011 6:41 am

You need to have some disk space... or you need to look at other distro: DSL, Sliztaz, Puppy, Slax, etc.

Try this to boot from the USB: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

There are others ways of installing and other tools:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=65022
http://boot.kernel.org/
http://ultilex.linux-bg.org/

rob2uk · Post by **rob2uk** » Wed Jun 15, 2011 7:13 am

nunol wrote:You need to have some disk space... or you need to look at other distro: DSL, Sliztaz, Puppy, Slax, etc.

Try this to boot from the USB: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

There are others ways of installing and other tools:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=65022
http://boot.kernel.org/
http://ultilex.linux-bg.org/

The laptop doesn't have an option to boot from USB, and he won't use a CD-R. None of those options are of any use.

nunol · Post by **nunol** » Wed Jun 15, 2011 7:23 am

At least two of the options can use a floppy to boot USB or from the web.

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