[SlugBug] Linux Desktop for an OLD machine (newbie question)

[Matthew Collins]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 04:48:45PM +0100, Mike Dewar wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been pulled into this list via an email I got from Sheffield Uni 
> about the film playing at the Showroom this week...
> 
> This list seems like a good place to ask a fairly newbie question that 
> I've been pondering... At home I run RH9 which is sort of slow on my P4 
> but in general is fast enough to use. However, at Uni I've been given an 
> old P2 with 128MB of RAM and I'm guessing that RH9 is going to be a bit 
> too much for it.
> 
> What kind of distro can you put on an old computer such as this?

Use redhat, but don't use Gnome or KDE. They tend to be the slowest
parts.
I use Debian, which can be a bit intimidating for a newbie to install,
but is not that difficult once you know what on earth it's asking you
during the install. 

Mozilla might be a bit heavyweight for it, but come on. That machine was
state of the art 3 years ago. The ram is more usfull than the processor
speed anyway. You've got enough of that, as long as you don't have loads
of stuff running that you don't need (like apache, samba, NFS daemons
etc etc)
You could always use Opera if Mozilla is too slow.

> 
> Is there any way I can run KDE or am I going to have to use one of the 
> old window manager/desktop thingies? I mainly want to run Mozilla and 
> Kile(a LaTeX specific editor) and a terminal to the faster UNIX machines 
> in  my department. I'm fairly new to the whole Linux thing, having used 
> Mandrake 8.something and RH9, but I'm not scared of trying something 
> more hardcore a la Slackware or Gentoo. However, I don't wanna spend 3 
> days installing them just to find that they're unusable...
> 
> Any guidance would be great - sorry if this is an inappropriate question 
>  for this group - let me know if I should only ask more hardcore 
> questions...

Nothing wrong with newbie questions :)