Thread: Linux-Beginners Guide

Well folks, I have had an interesting week. I was given an old Dell Inspiron 2600 laptop by my friend, who declared that it was not suitable for his needs. Naturally I grabbed the opportunity to own another laptop! However, in retrospect I began to have regrets when I fired it up. These are the specs:

Dell Inspiron PIII
Celeron Processor
256M RAM (!)
2 x USB ports
A paltry 10G HD
Not to mention a rubbish graphics card that simply refuses to load certain things.
Loaded with Win XP Home

The laptop actually wasn't too slow, however when online it would occasionally crash/freeze when downloading Antivirus software. I decided to use the laptop as a test model, and try installing user-friendly Linux systems on it, as I have heard that Linux is a great OS for ancient laptops and the new Linux OS's on offer are user-friendly and stable. There are literally thousands of Linux distributions (distro's) to chose from. The priority for me was user-friendliness, easy installation, ability to work with Broadcom wifi PCMCIA adaptor (apparently a tw** to use on a Linux OS), stability and ability to install on my new pc. Oh and the fact that any OS would need to be free.

The Linux distro's that I picked were:

* Vector Light 6.0
* Jolinux 1.0
* AntiX Mepis 8.5 Marek Edelmann
* Simply Mepis 8
* Linux Mint 9 (tiny edition)
* Damn Small Linux (DSL)
* Puppy Linux 4

All OS's were freely available on the Internet. I burned the ISO of each OS onto CD-R. I burned each OS on a slow burn, at 4x as recommended on various geeky forums

1. Vector Linux Light 6.0

Sadly this OS would not load on the Dell Inspiron 2600. It reached as far as the "Atapi drives" stage, then froze and hung up.

2. Jolinux 1.0

A new OS boasting minimal system requirements, fast browsing and great stability. Sadly it wouldn't load on the ancient Dell.

3. Linux Mint 9

Same again. I saw a great looking initial screen, then the disk refused to load. Obviously would not install on the Dell.

4. AntiX Mepis 8.5

This one did install, and nicely formatted the HD. There are literally millions of choices on the desktop, and the choice of wallpaper is impressive. However I found the whole experience confusing, as I struggled to configure my wireless card. After two days, and countless forum visits, I gave up. I'm sure that here is a way, but to be honest I wanted simple and my coding skills aren't great.

5. Simply Mepis 8.5

Finally success! This fired up straight away, AND it picked up my effing Broadcom 43 wireless card straight away. Great looking wallpaper, a simple interface, and Firefox installed.
I thought that my search for the ideal OS were over but sadly...

This OS was VERY buggy. Various symbols would not show up, large black "streaks" appeared on the desktop, and black shapes appeared all over the place. What a shame, considering that this was the best out-of-the-box system hat I had found so far. I also tried an earlier version of Simply Mepis, with identical results.

6. D*** Small Linux

Easily loaded, but after looking at the wallpaper...NO. I could not configure the wireless card and I didn't like the interface. Didn't pick up sound card either.

7. Puppy LInux.

Easily the best of the bunch, and ideal for small old laptops.

Loaded straight away.
Speedy Sea Monkey browser pre-installed.
Very little memory usage.
Great looking wallpaper
Lots of great things pre-installed
Easy to configure wireless card, as Broadcom driver came pre-installed and showed up straight away when I was setting up the WAN.

Best of the bunch by miles!

Originally Posted by Eureka

Puppy Linux is great for old PCs and low-spec netbooks. I find it a bit eccentric but works well when you get used to it.

Mint is very good but I'm not surprised that it would not load on this old laptop as it does need a decent minimum specification.

I liked the look of Mint, and downloaded the one that had the least amount of goodies bunged into it. Sadly that didn't work, although as you say it is the spec of the machine, combined with the atrocious Intel processor which pretty much kills off the installation. I was surprised that Vector Light wouldn't load

I have no complaints about Puppy: it's light, detects my printer automatically, and seems to have all the features that I need for a laptop. Chances are that this laptop will become my knockabout work laptop. Only criticism is that I'm not too keen on Seamonkey, although it's something I can get used to.

In the light distro range, Pup is certainly up there with the best, due to relative ease of installation and user-friendliness. I may have another go at installing AntiX Mepis, as I liked the Mepis range, and I feel more comfortable with Linux now, although I have a longgggg way to go!

Originally Posted by Eureka

You can get other browsers though. I installed Firefox on Puppy Linux without any problem.

Good luck with the experimentation...

Cheers,

Well after having a day at messing with the laptop, I'm sort of learning the ins and outs of it.

Basically every time that I was installing firefox it wouldn't run, and was showing errors due to "missing libraries". I eventually tracked down a download location for the missing libraries off a linux forum, and got firefox to work.

Then I deleted firefox and decided to stick with Seamonkey! I'm getting used to Puppy now, although I must admit that I preferred Simply Mepis. I think that this laptop will have to stay with Puppy, as the actual Graphics chip (Intel 810) is totally rubbish! Even the desktop wallpaper that came with Puppy looks bad lol, although the JPG actually fires up okay.

A suspiciously capitalist thread Remington...

Originally Posted by Red Rackham

A suspiciously capitalist thread Remington...

Haha noo! I'm spreading the good word about recycling ancient laptops using free Operating Systems, and hopefully encouraging people to kick Microsoft products to the kerb. It ain't as difficult as you may think....

Latest points:

* Getting the Canon MP series to actually fire up past the bleeps stage is difficult, but not impossible (thought I'd cracked it yesterday).

* Codecs and Quicktime. Actually getting codecs, and getting them to run Xine is impossible. Shame as it looks like a really good media player. I've managed to get the audio codecs running, but getting the codecs for Quicktime and Xine seems like an impossible task. I'm no computer buff, and am getting frustrated with coming across obstacles like this!

* I found that the latest version of Puppy won't install on the lousy Dell 2600

Well the Dell is working okay, still. I have decided to try a number of other linux distros out on this laptop.

As well as this I have upgraded the RAM, and after purchasing a whopping 256MB of RAM off Ebay (for the bargain price of 99p) I now have a laptop with 512 M of RAM. So I will update this thread with news on the other distros that I am trying. I have decided to go for older distros as I think I'll have more success due to the rubbishy 830 Intel jobby that is installed on the laptop.