How many of you use Linux?

[morrison]

I remember my 1st computer. abacus. I haven't advanced much since then.

[keepoffgrass]

I have a question... My desktop is a bit out dated. Its a 4 year old gateway with a pentium 4, 256 ram and runs XP. It doesnt seem fast enough to run Ubuntu, what version of linux would run smooth on it?

[adam]

ardchoille, you seem to be the most versed. What do you suggest? I know there is a lower powered version of ubuntu, xbuntu or somethign like that. any other ideas?

[Splash_4]

I have a modest network at home, which wasn’t designed, but merely grew, as I built new systems, and kept the old. I have a server using Ubuntu, which serves three main computers. One runs XP, another Win 2000, and the wife’s Apple. They are tied through the server running Linux and then to Cox Cable.

It’s a pretty kluged together system, but it works well for me. I seldom use floppies or CD’s anymore, but prefer to use external hard drives tied to the USB. That and thumb drives and old memory cards from old digital cameras.

I also have two flat screens side-by-each to allow really full advantage of the Windoze platform.

I’m pretty much of a geek, having grown up with computers since my first Timex Sinclair and Comadore Pet….. Those were the days, no keyboard to speak of, no hard drives, and real programming.

WOW, another old fart, computer geek on the board! I also have in a closet somewhere and old Sinclare 4k computer that I updated to 8k. I remember trying to type on that little keyboard and had to wind up using a pencil eraser. Then, after you typed all of the program in, you hoped that the cassette deck stored it for you!

I also built one of the early apples from plans and parts from Radio Shack... Man, do I feel old now!

[ardchoille]

ardchoille, you seem to be the most versed. What do you suggest? I know there is a lower powered version of ubuntu, xbuntu or somethign like that. any other ideas?

Xubuntu is simply Ubuntu with xfce as its default desktop (ubuntu, kubuntu, edubuntu, nubuntu, flubuntu and xubuntu all use the same repos anyway). Xfce runs quite well on older hardware and it's much faster than either KDE or gnome. Give xubuntu a try. If that fails your needs, try using a window manager instead of a full desktop. The fluxbox and WindowMaker window managers (in the repos) are super fast and light on system resources.. not to mention beautiful and easy to use.

[ardchoille]

I have a question... My desktop is a bit out dated. Its a 4 year old gateway with a pentium 4, 256 ram and runs XP. It doesnt seem fast enough to run Ubuntu, what version of linux would run smooth on it?

Ubuntu uses the gnome desktop as its default and kubuntu uses the KDE desktop. I have found KDE to be faster than gnome, but the xfce desktop is faster than both of them. For older hardware, if you want to stick with an ubuntu derivative, I'd recommend you try xubuntu. It uses xfce as its default desktop (still uses the gtk toolkit) and it's a lot faster. If that is still slow, you could install Ubuntu and use a window manager instead of a desktop environment (such as fluxbox or windowmaker, both are lighter and faster) or you could try a different distro. That's one of the wonderful things about Linux, you can change almost any aspect of it without harming the system or having to reboot.

[keepoffgrass]

Ubuntu uses the gnome desktop as its default and kubuntu uses the KDE desktop. I have found KDE to be faster than gnome, but the xfce desktop is faster than both of them. For older hardware, if you want to stick with an ubuntu derivative, I'd recommend you try xubuntu. It uses xfce as its default desktop (still uses the gtk toolkit) and it's a lot faster. If that is still slow, you could install Ubuntu and use a window manager instead of a desktop environment (such as fluxbox or windowmaker, both are lighter and faster) or you could try a different distro. That's one of the wonderful things about Linux, you can change almost any aspect of it without harming the system or having to reboot.

great! thanks!!

[pbpersson]

WOW! A Linux discussion on a kilt forum? Cool!

I have used RedHat, Mandrake, and SUSE. I am about to explore Ubuntu because several people have told me it rocks. I will also look at Fedora.

In my new house I will have a Linux lab with three Linux computers and I hope to use them all remotely over the home network from the master bedroom.

It seems I can never be as productive on Linux because I'm not too familiar with the OS or apps as I am with Windows.....but I keep trying. I hate the licensing fees on Windows. I can't really afford to buy the software I want.

Now I am learning to write apps in Java and they will work on Windows or Linux so that is an added incentive to get used to the Linux world. I find it fascinating how much is out there for Linux.....and it is all free!

[reedplayernc]

I've used Slackware for years and have been pleased with it being semi-automatic during the installation and use. It has utilities that get some of the tricky stuff out of the way while still letting me dig deep to do a lot of things myself. I was skeptical of the reported ease of Ubuntu, after all, I was a Slackware snob, lol! I recently had a hard drive fail in my Sony Vaio laptop which was running Windows XP. I tried Ubuntu and am absolutely blown away by it. It seems that Ubuntu is as easy or complex as you want it to be. The Debian-based package management system is great.

Some of the other posts in this thread are really good with the suggestions on how to lighten-up the GUI for older systems, using xfce for example. My laptop is several years old (don't remember how many), but I still wanted to run KDE as the desktop. I got away with it by trimming back some of the special effects of KDE, so I still get reasonable performance with an AMD Athlon XP 1600 processor with 256 megs of RAM. One problem was during the install of Ubuntu. 256 of RAM seems to be the bare minimum for booting the live CD then running the graphical installation routine. The installer would freeze up on my Sony. The workaround was to use the *alternate desktop CD* which goes into a text-based installer, and is still automatic mostly.

After all these years it's still hard for me to believe that such wonderful operating systems and applications are just a download away.

[timber]

I have been using slackware for at least 10 years