Neighbor is getting a pc for his Mother-In-Law. Its a old one, 133mhz, with 32 megs of ram and 1.2 gig hdd. Its a ABC with old HP monitor. Can I get 9.1 to work on it and if so what would I have to do. Also if I couldn't what distro would work, something that is realatively easy to install. His Mother-in-law has NO idea about pcs so I figure since is was a old machine it would run linux nicely. It had Virus95 on it. They are paying 50 bucks for it.

Thanks for the suggestion and help ahead of time.

FX

EDIT: She just wants to use it for email and some word processing.

You have got to be kidding??



50US for a 133mhz, in my view that's a huge rip off!!

You'd be better off lookin in the trading post and getting something a little better for that much.

Anyway, I think KDE and Gnome would run pretty slow. You might have to use something else I think.


James

I think that a machine that old would struggle to run a recent version of KDE or Gnome. From personal expience my K6-2 ran KDE v2 quite happily but p200 was too slow. You could still use MDK 9.1 with a more cut down environment but I doubt thats what you really want.

You might want to suggest to you neighbour that he/she gets a new budget machine. Something like the Lindows/Mandrake/SuSE offerings of Walmart.

I run fine on a 300mhz, 160mb ram, maybe look for something like this. I run KDE and GNOME fine.

Go for Icewm as a windowmanager, and realise that to install mdk9.1 it will be a pain, it was even a pain on a 64MB machine (pIII 766MHz of all things, it was not the cpu speed!!). Memory counts.

If you can get it to install, tweak it by switching off all unnecessary services (ftp servers, mail stuff, etcetc).

Don't even think about kde or gnome; icewm (very much like win95) or blackbox (which I only once had a look at) should work nicely though.

Not using kde or gnome means also: not using konqueror, kmail, evolution, nautilus either...

On a side note, 50USD is a bit much; I just tried to 'sell' an old P 166MMX with 48MB of ram and 3.2GB hd (plus audio, plus network) for 35USD and got my offer turned down...



Basically, it's likely not worth the hassle with such an old machine...

I was thinking that it is too much for it, but really can't tell them much. As far as getting 9.1 to load I didn't think that would go either, I was just trying to help them out as best as I could.

With the prices that pc are at now-a-days you really can't go wrong to buy a new one. (even if it does have the treaded windoze on it)

I'll tell them what I think and they can go from there. Thanks for the input, I kind of already knew the answers, but just wanted to make sure.

FX

I was given (as in free) an old 100Mhz Pentium, 16Meg RAM, 1 Gig harddrive, ancient Linksys NIC and old monitor. No sound card, no keyboard, no mouse.

I purchased a keyboard and PS/2 mouse.
I then purchased an AT to PS/2 adapter for the keyboard
Then a serial adapter for the mouse (3rd time back to the store)
But the PC requires a serial mouse, so I started looking for a source for serial mice.
Oh yeah, also bought a patch cable.

The PC had Win95 installed, but no drivers for the nic. I called the person that gave it, and got a model number. Downloaded drivers - no good. Downloaded 2 more times just in case it was an error in downloading or the floppy. Still no good.

Tried to install Mandrake. That failed miserably. The doc says you need 64 meg RAM to install Mandrake 9.1, let's just say 16 would not get it done.

I will return that "free" PC this week, then decide on keeping or returning the keyboard. The thing was a bust on Win95. I had Win98SE Upgrade and tried that. It was horrendously slow (still no Ethernet drivers and no mouse functionality). A bust on Win98SE. And completely no go on Mandrake.

I could probably try a different distro, but it is simply not worth the effort.

That pc should be given away ML9.1? Never. Slackware would be good for an easy install. Debian better but harder to install (it's really not that hard,IMO).

Fry's has a pc for $189USD(w/o monitor) with an 800MHz?something....I think Duron?, 128mb, 30GB hd, cdrom, and floppy that comes with ThizLinux.
http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php?t=7145

I told them not too, not sure what they are gonna do. I can keep pushing them to make sure they don't get it.

I just seen Linux loaded on some really small hardware and old hardware and wasn't really sure on how it was done, thats why I suggested to them about Linux.

FX