Do you recall Frank's Oil Cooled Linux Box?

[Simon]

No? Well I posted this blog about it here... Frank's Oil Cooled Linux Box. Well after running non-stop for a year the monster died and we dumped the oil and pitched the machine. R.I.P. "Frank n' Simon"

That happened Friday afternoon and this weekend I found him a used PC at a local yard sale. My girl and I want to get it cleaned up for him as a surprise. But no oil this time lol. It is an old Gateway machine I got for $25 I wanted to know if this should have the current version (14.04) or less? Here are the specs;

CPU: 1.2GHz Intel Celeron
RAM: 512MB PC100/133 SDRAM DIMMs
HDD: 40 GB
MODEL: 300 X
MFG: 2002

Yes, 12 years old and still humming lol. But you see Frank is into old stuff, steam punk, and retro. It took me an hour just to figure out how to open the stupid case.



So what should I put on this Kubuntu 10.10? What do you think it will handle?

[Snowhog]

Minimum System Requirements

[vinnywright]

the ram will be a bit low despite the min system requirements ,,,,,,I would try to get more.

I have had some luck on low ram boxes installing fluxbox and using it at the log in screen instead of plasma desktop.
or disable as meney unnecessary services as you can ,,,,,, effects and sutch ,

VINNY

and make shure you give it a lot of swap space.

[woodsmoke]

Not the JohnnieMan.....who left the plasticine discs our future generations to find....I have extract6ed an image of the Johnnieman from a crystalllll I hope3 that it apparrazzz



but....for the GregMan....he who has no picture....the Gregman had a "thing" that extended up into the lasdspire..... with heat dispersing units....they glowed in the dark.....

But.....even he...leaned that HARDware;.....................has each, into themselves....unique..problems.....

YOUR STUFF.........is what...........a thousand years old...?///

BUT..................DO YOU UNDERSTAND STEAMPUNK?

BE more vernacular in your time/space/continumum/vernacuuuuuuulllaarrkkk....

I await your ..................brass/leather/..................ocular...............response... ..

if you meet me I'll purchase synthcoffee or not....synthcoffee is not...for...everyone...

[Simon]

@Snowhog: Thanks for the info on that, I figured it might work since it originally ran XP. Only problem is the CD ROM is just that, a CD and not a DVD. So I guess I will hope I don't get any issues booting the install from a USB drive.

@Vinnywright: I agree with you, but there is only two slots and I think the machine is maxed (from what little I read up on it) they shipped with 128 and was expandable to 512. He doesn't play games, before last year the only computer he has was his phone. He has his "collectibles" in the apartment I call it junk. Mainly all he needs is something to browse his ladies on Facebook. So I think I can go with standard VGA and he should be fine.

@Woodsmoke: What can I say dude? No... really, what can I say except quote what a good friend once told me;

Tonight I sit by the fire in my hut, I ponder the age old question. I ask the cat for his pipe but he refuses, because he doesn't want to breath in the second hand smoke. So I take another drink from the man's skull who was killed last night in a violent garden gnome accident. The cat takes a long draw on his pipe and asks me as he exhales rings of purple smoke, "What are you drinking from that man's skull?". I peer into the lime green fluid looking for an answer and the liquid looks back in silent remorse. "It is green.", I answer as I take another drink. Now the fire begins to slowly die, so I stir the coals and toss the cat in to feed the flames. Then I sit back a reflect in silence on that age old question. I ask myself, "What is that age old question anyways?". The cat says nothing but continues to smoke a bit. As I take the last drink from the dead man's skull, he finally states, "Well, I am dry. Do you want to put more green stuff in my skull or just go bowling? I take him bowling and I beat him with a score 235 to his 126. He flirted with some girls so that threw his game off. He went home with one of them. I returned to my hut and toss more cats on the fire to keep it warm. As I turned in, the cat with the pipe pulled his charred remains from the fire and curled up next to me to keep warm. Tomorrow I will drink something blue from his skull. Goodnight.

That probably makes more sense to you than it ever did to me.

[jlittle]

With only 500 MiB of RAM, Kubuntu would be too much, and too slow. I ran Kubuntu for a while with 1 GiB, and it wasn't enough for some use cases (firefox with a few tabs) I had.

I would try Lubuntu, though I don't know if it would cope with a browser like firefox. With Lubuntu you've got a distro designed for old computers like that; I've put it to great success on several old XP boxes, but they've all had 1 GiB RAM. Runs in only 167 MiB without a browser.

[Simon]

Thanks John, I was about to start on it today when I saw your post and decide to do some more research.

I found this on How to Geek, it sounds to me like Puppy is a perfect tool for this old machine.

Also this is something I never ran into before on a computer. It appears to have some kind of ROM disk or chip "built in". At first I thought it was a HDD partition for back up. But it looks like Gateway stuck in something of their own directly into the mobo because when I booted without the HDD I found it was still in there. It appears to be a built in recovery system of some kind. From what I read about Gateway, Frank should never hit ALT + F10 at start up and he should be ok.

Edit: Puppy might not be for Frank after all... I just installed it to my VM and it looks, well, complicated. Frank is more of a simple user.

I will check out Lubuntu now.

[woodsmoke]

Well Simon......actually......it did ...after I asked Alice!

woodsmoke

[jlittle]

I will check out Lubuntu now.

BTW, if you getting into a support commitment, and he's not physically nearby, I suggest installing something like Team Viewer and becoming familiar with it, before you need it. Team Viewer crashes a bit on my 64 bit Kubuntu Trusty, but reconnects on restarting it.

Regards, John Little

[Simon]

No Frank and I are room mates, that is we share an flat and also work together at the clinic. So he is just across the hall from me, if he needs any help. Even though we are medical geeks, I introduced him to Linux and he thinks it is "cool" that people, rather than a corporation, can band together and make an OS. I also forgot about the "blogs" on this forum being private, so I fixed that link I made in the posting at the top. Frank did a lot of work on his first machine and it was older, cruddier, and oilier than this one. He used it on occasion to impress the girls and surf the web. Even though it gave off an odd oder at times, I was still sad to see it go. We often joked after making that one that the next would run inside a gerbil cage and be powered by its wheel.

[GreyGeek]

... Puppy might not be for Frank after all... I just installed it to my VM and it looks, well, complicated. Frank is more of a simple user.

Give CrunchBang 11 a try. It is running a 10 year old pentium laptop nicely, and it's quick. Gnome-like in appearance. Right mouse click menu if you want it, top bar, etc...

[Qqmike]

And, of course, you can always try a Kubuntu version and see how it goes ...

[sithlord48]

i would try the following

install ubuntu server
install the package software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lubuntu-dev/lubuntu-daily
update package cache
install lxqt-metapackage

you sould then reboot and be able to log in to a lxqt session..

all the lightness of lxde and all the Qt of razor Qt.. install kde parts where needed (i almost always use dolphin)

note: lxqt is still in dev (newest version is 0.8 iirc)

[Simon]

Something didn't work so well with the Lubuntu it kept crashing during install, it may have been a bad copy from ISO to CD, so I tried the Puppy Linux and that worked out ok but I can't configure the network on it. I tried both Auto DHCP and Static. I can see the connection on the router as a wired unknown, MAC ID, assigned an IP, etc.. So I know that is good but when I try to access a browser or download it says "no internet". If I can't puppy working with the internet I might should try to find his old Debian disk (I told him not to lose it) or burn him a new one. His old, older PC was running Debian with the classic Gnome interface. Normally I would have just swapped out the HDD but during the messy disconnect the 60 GB slid down into the tank and I am not a fisherman. After that there wasn't much to salvage.

@Qqmike: The machine refuses to "see" the USB for boot and the CD ROM is limited to CD and all the distros are above that. But if I can get puppy to "see" the internet network, I should be able to download and install anything. Thank you.

@sithlord48: Same thing as above, I would try that, if I can get beyond the networking issue. Thanks.

@GreyGeek: I will look it over, thank you.

For now, since I installed Puppy, I am going to look for a simple answer about the network on their forums. If the Puppy can't see it, then I will try to find the same distro of Debian he was running and try that. Also I figured out what that mysterious partition was. It is called "Intel Boot Agent" (IBA) and I disabled it in the BIOS. Apparently this device boots from the network. I will poke around in the BIOS and make sure the network card is active. I will let you know what OS he ends up with but I feel this will be "solved" some time tonight.

Update: Debian / Gnome "Squeeze" he loves the new machine and asked us, "But where is the gerbil?"