hey guys, I need some advice... I have a dell dimension (P4 @3.00GHz, 512MB, CD-RW, 80GB IDE HDD) and i need to put linux on it. It cant handle winblows without seriously lagging, and I cant do OSX86 cause I lack a DVD drive, so im stuck with Linux... So far Ive tried Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse KDE. They all work, but they all have quirks in them. Ubuntu seems to work the most and the best, but when running updates it downloaded and installed all but a few and froze on one, I think Totem or something similar. It locked up completely and I did a hard restart. When GRUB loaded, it showed it did a kernel update. Apparently, the kernel either didnt install correctly or something else was causing panic, because it stopped in GRUB and said i had kernel panic. That was the most recent kernel (i think 2.7.11? it ends in 11). When I switch to the earlier kernel (ending in 7) everything works except Synpatic or when i try to add packages. It says its all ready running, when its not. So thats the issue with Ubuntu. Fedora has just a minor flaw - firefox. Firefox seems to mess up certain webpages and images, by moving them from one spot to another. This happens on PHP pages, and the text and images are moved vertically only. So far thats my only issue with Fedora. OpenSuse works nice, except I have to force it into safe graphics to be able to read my screen. Same thing with Kubuntu, so its a KDE and graphics card issue. Only thing I havent tried (that I have on hand) is BackTrack3, but that should work fine, but its CLI to install it... So anyone got any suggestions as to a good Gnome-based distro is? I need some feedback
yeah I hear you on KDE being like Win-hell. Isnt Debian a bit more like Gentoo in the sense of its not noob friendly? ive downloaded it, and im burning to disk in a minute
what version of ubuntu did you try? im running 9.04 on my inspiron 6000 with 2gb ram and 1.6ghz processor and its a dream.
I'd stick with Ubuntu to be honest, 9.04 seems to work a treat. Failing that, there's always Mandriva.
not using 9.04 cause of an ext4 bug... i was using 8.10... and you failed to see my hardware specs... theyre quite lower then yours
Debian has a bad rap but tbh with the new installer it installs all the bloat you'd get with a normal distro and there for works out the box. If i were you i'd go with debian and do a desktop install but then thats how i got started . Once your comfortable you can start to trim things down to speed the system up. Either that or try Ubuntu again it might have just been a corrupted download, it happens. Or the kernel could have been hosed when you had to hard reset your box again it happens.
i think the kernel f'd up when it froze in the update install.... Im going to retry it to see if it will work... hopefully it will debian has a bad rap? how so?
i was running ubuntu on this laptop when i had 512mb of ram, i still think ubuntu is the best choice but then again i havent been running it for a long time so there may be a better one out.
Ubuntu is pretty good and is normally my first choice. Last time I used this computer with linux, it was running 7.10 and there werent any errors with it... I just reinstalled 8.10 and am running updates now, to see if its a kernel/driver issue...
Like other said, I'd stick with Ubuntu. I've had it running flawlessly on 1.6GHz and 512MB RAM - with Fluxbox rather than Gnome as a window manager, but Gnome apps were in use. I don't know where the boot-up problems come from - what you could do is to try the older (7.10 to 8.10) versions for now, and if you want the newest possible version, go up one version at a time (without updates) until you hit the one where it crashes. Then you'll find the answer to your problem, sort of anyway. It could be a fairly unique hardware/kernel clash.
I had Xubuntu running on similar specs recently and it was smooth. Heh, it wasn't even that bad running on my eeePC and that's the original 701...
That PC can't handle Windows? How so? WinXP ran decently on systems with sub 1ghz PIIIs and 128MB RAM. I have Win7 running on a system with a slower CPU than that, though with more RAM, and it's perfect.
Windows XP should be fine on that PC, i've got it on a laptop running a 1.13ghz and 512mb ram - but i did lower the graphic interface in the performance options.
Ext4 is not the standard file system in 9.04. And I'm running debian 4 on a 1gig p3 with 384 meg, with xfce as it is normally headless for a download box. The only lag i get is when automatically checking files with par's and un-raring multi rar downloads. When I have the time I'm going to switch the box over to Ubuntu 9.04.
