[GLLUG] Ubuntu on damaged hardware...

[Caleb Cushing]

I agree... although you don't need perfectly new hardware... and can get
away with less than XP it does need good hardware. Ram is extremely
important especially on a live cd. I would suggest for a live cd distro try
DSL (Damn Small Linux) It would be the best for a system without much in the
way of resourses.  xubuntu could be installed... but if it were still too
much of  resource hog install fluxbox and run it for wm (window manager),
which is what DSL uses.


On 7/13/06, Andy Lee <ALEE at courts.mi.gov> wrote:
>
> This may not be a popular sentiment, but Linux in its current state, for
> distros like SuSE or Ubuntu, without optimizations, with X and all the
> pretty GUI stuff everyone wants, is a pig. It runs great on new fast
> hardware, but the thought that you can drop Linux on an old PC and squeeze
> extra years out of it is false, for what most people want.
>
> That said, you should be able to do a custom install with one of the
> lighter window managers to get these people something to surf the net and
> check mail with. Don't bother installing OpenOffice or the Gimp, it will
> spoil their view of Linux.
>
> >>> Thomas Hruska <thruska at cubiclesoft.com> 7/12/2006 8:39 PM >>>
> I was at a friend's place the other day and they were open to the idea
> of trying out Linux since Windows was out of the budget.  So I
> downloaded and burned Ubuntu and inserted the Live CD into the drive.
> The hardware was really old (was running WinME) but had been upgraded to
> 128MB RAM (IIRC, the CPU was a Pentium 250MHz).
>
> When I booted up with the Live CD, it started crawling very slowly.
> After about 5 minutes, it switched back to text mode and displayed a
> half-dozen "sector error" messages, which told me that the laptop had a
> bad hard drive.  However, it seems kind of odd that Ubuntu needed access
> to the hard drive at all.  I let it continue to attempt to boot up for
> another 10 minutes but it didn't seem to be doing very much.
>
> I booted the Live CD on a different computer just fine just to make sure
> the burn process hadn't been borked.  That computer had a considerably
> faster CPU but Ubuntu seemed to boot much slower than the Windows XP
> install on the same PC.  Is a Live CD just slower or can I use it as a
> relative measure of how fast the OS will actually load on real hardware?
>
> If I wanted to install Ubuntu on that computer (without changing the
> hard drive), how would I go about doing that.  I've hand-edited both
> FAT16 and FAT32 partitions before to mark bad sectors to drastically
> extend the life of a hard drive.  However, Linux uses EXT3 and that's a
> pretty extravagant format with the likelihood of seriously messing up
> (FAT16/FAT32 is far more forgiving).  Any tools out there designed to
> mark bad sectors/clusters under EXT3 filesystems?
>
> I'm also going to look at Xubuntu and see if that is a viable option in
> the future for when I encounter similar scenarios.  Anyone running
> Xubuntu and have a good feel for the minimum CPU speed that it will run
> _decently_ on?  Ubuntu clearly requires something like a 1.5GHz CPU to
> operate decently.
>
> --
> Thomas Hruska
> CubicleSoft President
> Ph: 517-803-4197
>
> Safe C++ Design Principles (First Edition)
> Learn how to write memory leak-free, secure,
> portable, and user-friendly software.
>
> Learn more and view a sample chapter:
> http://www.CubicleSoft.com/SafeCPPDesign/
>
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