Disappointed in Ubuntu

[King X13]

Some of you may have seen me posting about Ubuntu cuz ive been trying to play with it to put it into play along side my windows network. ive gotten it to work fine on my upper end systems so i pulled a system out from the back room. a Dell optiplex GX1.

now the min specs it says for ubuntu is a intel 100 with 64 megs of ram. This is a p2 with 128 megs so i should be more then fine.

So my frist attempt fails with an I/O error on HDC, find out its the CD drive, so i grab one out of another machine and i can finally boot into the gui that runs off the CD.

Then the system Hangs and after double clicking the Install Icon and waiting 15 min and nothing happening, then even right clicking and opening the install icon and waiting 15 min and nothing happens. i then up the memory to 256.

So my 3rd try with about 4 times the amout of min memory needed, and a cd drive far beyond what a intel 100 system would have my install is going, and at a very very slow pace.

Im not understanding the false minimum specs for ubuntu. Now it runs 800 times better on a p4 then windows in my opinion. but its rumored to be this cure for old system that newer windows just wouldnt fuction on and im left surprised that it runs the same way if not slower on an older system then windows.

Idk any thoughts from anyone?

 

[FlashDude]

Those specs are for ubuntu not the GUI!! gonome or kde. That is for a text based os with no gui. You can't get the speed or eye candy without having the ram and cpu power. Even in a live distro ram is very important.

And I know all about the slow install times on older stuff. For some reason Ubuntu is a little slower than suse but it still takes hours on a amd k62 with 192mb ram. Just think about it this way you wouldn't be able to run XP well with that machine so linux is as nice looking as xp (I think better but that's just me) so don't expect much.

 

[King X13]

ok i agree with everything you say. but ubuntu throws you into a gui to even install it. so how would i install it with out being thrown into the "preview gui" and then having to hit the install icon.

cuz when y ou boot with the cd it only gives you the 1 option of going into the gui that runs off the cd and ram.

 

[The General]

ok i agree with everything you say. but ubuntu throws you into a gui to even install it. so how would i install it with out being thrown into the "preview gui" and then having to hit the install icon.

cuz when y ou boot with the cd it only gives you the 1 option of going into the gui that runs off the cd and ram.

Ubuntu can be debootstraped, you do not have to use the GUI installer.

If you can't find the menu when you boot it, just kill X ... open a terminal and sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

 

[FlashDude]

I will also add that you might want to try **** small linux - NOT , dsl-n is alot like dsl except the nice hdd install. Your system might still surprise you. The install times are a fraction of a full desktop disto but of course it won't have as much built in.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-n/

 

[Sevoma]

The text install should work fine. With the gui install, it has to load a bunch a stuff into memory, uncompress on the fly and all of the other stuff. This needs a powerful machine.

 

[jakec]

yeah you might want to try anoter distro designed specifically for older hardware:

feather Linux
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/

Vector Linux 4.3
http://www.vectorlinux.com/

DSL
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Puppy Linux
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=3

Slackware
http://www.slackware.com/

BeatrIX
http://www.watsky.net/

you can find more here:
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Mini_Distributions/
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/
http://www.linux.org/dist/list.html

you can always install xoffice or another lightweight window manager though apt-get

Ubuntu can be heavy on system recources. I don't like ubuntu anyway but we won't go into that here

Cheers,

Jake

 

[King X13]

cool, thanks for all the info, facts, and opinions. and thanks jakec for the links for older systems i will check them out.

 

[FlashDude]

Just a FYI , I installed dsl-n on a celeron 300 with 64mb's of ram in less than 10 minutes. That includes boot the live cd click hdd install (don't forget to use hda1 hda0 is the live distro) used lilo boot loader and like I said it booted in less than 10 minutes.

 

[King X13]

thanks flash dude for the input, ill give that a try in work on monday.