Noob..Linux For An Old Laptop

[alexrjohnson]

I have an old Hitachi Visionbook 7775 Pro. It is Pentium II 266mhz, 64mb of ram, 3.8gb hard drive, cd rom drive, and 2mb asiliant graphics card. The native OS is Windows 95/98 but I have nothing but problems with Windows. Everything runs so slow and boggy! Somebody on this forum reccomended me to using Linux. Wow where to start? I've booted like every version of Windows on this computer, nothing seems to satisfy me. I want to put Linux on, a clean boot so that Linux is my only operating system. I'm just worried about a few things: 1)My Belkin 54g Wireless USB adapter working for internet 2)Play old games such as Dos Games or Age of Empires 3)Working Aim, typing, and other essential apps. I want a decent looking GUI but it has to run smooth on this old machine. I'm not computer retarded and am willing to learn and figure some stuff out, just completely new to Linux. What Linux OS is the best one to start me off? I'm currently downloading Damn Small Linux cuz that looked easy to me but I'm sure I can find better.

 

[jakec]

Follow this Link and Read my post

http://www.techist.com/showthread.php?threadid=67266

It has links to all of my 3 reccomendations

Hope this helps

Jake

 

[macdude425]

GNOME and KDE, the most popular window managers, are resource hogs. Period, end of story. I wouldn't even dream of running them with less than 128MB of RAM. Just about any distro would would suffice for your purposes, but I would not install GNOME or KDE and would try something like Fluxbox. It runs well with 48MB of RAM on my Pentium 75.

As for Wordprocessing and Instant Messaging, they won't be problems if ya pick up a copy of OpenOffice and Gaim.
http://openoffice.org and http://gaim.sourceforge.net

Most older DOS games run just fine under DOSBox, so that shouldn't be a problem:
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net

As for the WLAN card, look into the Ndiswrapper project, that lets you use Windows wireless card drivers in Linux:
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net

I noticed that you downloaded DSL. It is a good distro, but a bit limited.

 

[furtivefelon]

i would also try Enlightenment, though i personally prefer fluxbox..

wine should be able to run AoE on your computer, but prob needs some tinkering..

 

[horndude]

before you get very far, go here:

http://www.tuxmobil.org

see what others have done with that make/brand/model of laptop, laptops and linux arent usually good for rookie to start out with because of hardware support issues

 

[alexrjohnson]

Alright I think I'm gonna give fluxbox a go? I want the Linux system to be the only system on my computer. So in other words a fresh format and boot. And something about wine being able to play my age of empires game? Also I just upgraded the notebooks memory to 128mb.

 

[furtivefelon]

the following two links might interest you:

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?appId=99

http://appdb.winehq.org/appbrowse.php?catId=57

also, fluxbox needs tinkering and learning (as most configuration options is buried in text files), you can try KDE, if it runs smoothly for you, then stick with that until your comfortable with linux

 

[jakec]

I Agree with Furtive,

Fluxbox does take tinkering and a bit of mucking around with, although I would use GNOME and not KDE. but yeah don't use Fluxbox, the basic Applications and a few games should run fine in either KDE or GNOME whichever you decide

Jake

 

[macdude425]

Oh, you have 128MB of RAM. On that KDE or GNOME should run just fine, so forgetting about Fluxbox is a good idea. I prefer KDE

 

[Sevoma]

I would use xfce for a gui.