Need fedora for old comp!

[WoWAnon]

Ok, here's the deal. My Dad is perpetually griping about how much he hates windows. I got him a used Mac, and he didn't care for it. So Linux is his last chance.


I scrounged up an old computer that has:

-a 450mhz Pentium III
-256 megs of RAM
-a 13 gig drive


I am taking a basic class in Linux, and the book came with some old Fedora 2 disks. I installed Core 2 with them and the computer runs fine, (it is a little slow but it works). The problem is, he wants to stream video, and every time I attempt to install Flash, I get package dependency errors. I have tried to track down the packages, but when I try to 'rpm' those, I get FURTHER package dependency errors.

Tried YUM, it cannot find the correct files online.

Also, Yahoo doesn't like the old version of Mozilla that Core 2 comes with, so he can't check his email either. Had more package dependency errors trying to run FireFox.


So at this point I'm thinking that Core 2 is just too old. My class professor basically said that I need to get new hardware and use a newer distro, but that's not going to happen, so he recommended Core 8.


So I followed this link: http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/8/

to

http://archive.kernel.org/fedora-archive/

and got a mish-mash of random files like "Extras", "Releases", and "Tests", and I am kinda lost. Does anyone know:

A) which core would be best to run on old hardware that will just give me what I need to install FireFox and stream video

and

B) where I can just find a disk image file of that core? The archives seem to have everything scattered all over the place.



I'm just getting frustrated trying to track down rpmlib(PayloadIsLzma) all over the place lol.


Any help would be appreciated.

[Hlingler]

-a 450mhz Pentium III
-256 megs of RAM
-a 13 gig drive

The Fedora LXDE re-spin should work fine on this. See Machine #3 in my sig, running F11-LXDE.i586 with:
> 466 MHx Celeron CPU
> 256 MB RAM
> Two old small HDDs - Fedora is on one 4 GB partition.

The F12 LXDE spin was pulled due to a problem, but should be re-issued shortly.

V

[SlowJet]

CentOS 5.4 would match up with that hardware very well.

SJ

[WoWAnon]

Ok, CentOS 5.4 and F12 LXDE spin when it comes back out. Got it. I will look into these. Thank you for the info!

[Aloone]

Memory is normally the main problem.

I've ran Fedora 11 with Gnome on 248MB of RAM (256-8MB for the on board graphics card) and the performance was all right even when using OpenOffice and Inkscape.

Use Fedora 12 with XFCE and it should fly.

I now have 512MB of memory installed and I don't think I'll upgrade any time soon. Having the latest hardware seems like a waste unless you're into 3D CAD, video editing or games.

I've found having a reasonably fast hard drive iis also worthwhile and I'd recommend upgrading it if you can.

[Dan]

http://puppylinux.org/main/index.php...%20Started.htm

Hard to go wrong with the Puppy.

[CiaW]

Puppy's probably a good choice, but I've had some issues with the few versions of it I've tried except slaxer pup. Of course, ymmv. (And I'm using slaxer pup now as I type this...) Slaxer Pup comes with a default browser of SeaMonkey 1.1.11 -- which is actually ok but I haven't tried to install flash yet either. For streaming video you'd probably have to search the Puppy forums for pet packages to install to get flash and possibly a newer browser.

Another option, is #!Crunchbang linux, which comes via a live cd; and has VLC media player and flash player already available. It's based on Ubuntu; and I'll throw out the caveat that it's annoyed me enough in the last couple of weeks (with a seemingly unsolvable issue with the system time and other Ubuntu 'features'...) that I may be getting rid of it if I can get F12 to install from the livecd, without having to use the LVM. From my perspective, on older / slower hardware, the LVM makes it too slow. But again, others may have different experiences...

The F12 livecd booted on this laptop fine, it just wouldn't install -- but another thread may have found the solution to that! Hope you find the right solution

[kyryder]

I like puppy for the older machines also. The last couple releases of puppy I have tried have had flash player already installed.

[Aloone]

I've never tried Puppy because its security model, or lack of thereof, put me off: Puppy runs as root which makes it as secure as Windows ME.

[kyryder]

I've never tried Puppy because its security model, or lack of thereof, put me off: Puppy runs as root which makes it as secure as Windows ME.

There is a multi-user version of puppy now so you don't have to run it as root.

EDIT: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtop...548749&t=47409

[John the train]

The argument for Puppy being safe running as root ( as I understand it ) is that in a frugal install - see Puppy site for an explanation - every boot is effectively a fresh install as Puppy is created in RAM from a read-only file, so any malware will not survive a re-boot. Puppy also includes a firewall, SElinux, activating that is a couple of clicks if you don't have a firewall in your modem/router or want to be extra sure - default firewall settings are pretty tight, as per most Linux distros. - I've activated it on my laptop as I may have to connect to wireless networks with less than ideal security. ( Multi-user was not an option as it wouldn't work with Pwireless2, essential wear for roaming. )

[kyryder]

The argument for Puppy being safe running as root ( as I understand it ) is that in a frugal install - see Puppy site for an explanation - every boot is effectively a fresh install as Puppy is created in RAM from a read-only file, so any malware will not survive a re-boot. Puppy also includes a firewall, SElinux, activating that is a couple of clicks if you don't have a firewall in your modem/router or want to be extra sure - default firewall settings are pretty tight, as per most Linux distros. - I've activated it on my laptop as I may have to connect to wireless networks with less than ideal security. ( Multi-user was not an option as it wouldn't work with Pwireless2, essential wear for roaming. )

Thanks John,
I was not aware of the multi-user Pwireless issue as I haven't actually used the multi-user version. Like you said above you can set puppy up to load its original img into RAM from cd or hd giving you a fresh puppy every time you boot. I have set boxes up this way for some freinds that tend to have chronic user error or chronic malware/virus issues.

I have thought about using Fedora in the same way but have never got around to setting it up for anyone. What I have considered doing is taking the Fedora live cd and use revisor to put in all updates and packages I might want like flash and codecs, or whatever. Install grub to partition 1 and and point grub to partition 2 with the new img dded to partition 2.

I guess you really could do this with any live cd.

[Aloone]

It's good to know that Puppy comes in a more secure flavour.

One thing I've noticed with many light Linux distributions is that they all seem to include AbiWord and Gnumeric over OpenOffice.org.

To be honest, I would prefer an older OpenOffice.org version than any of the above for systems with <256MB of RAM: for systems with 128MB, I'd recommend 2.4.3 and for 64MB, 1.1.5 is probably fine. Even OOo 1.1.5 is more feature rich than both AbiWord and Gnumeric put together; it includes a presentation, drawing program and seems to do a better job of reading MS Office files. OpenOffice.org also can be configured to use less memory if needs be.

http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/s...s_reqs_11.html
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/s...s_reqs_20.html
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/s...s_reqs_30.html Yes I know it says 512MB recommended but I've have run it on 256MB and I was happy with the performance.

If you've got 32MB than it's probably a good idea to use AbiWord and Gnumeric but they lack many features so it seems silly if you've got 64MB or more an enough disk space i.e. you're not using a tiny USB or solid state drive then old OpenOffice.org is probably best.

[SlowJet]

"From my perspective, on older / slower hardware, the LVM makes it too slow. But again, others may have different experiences..."

Yep, it takes an extra second at start up.
And to re-install to change the partitions size only takes a day or so. lol

SJ

P. S. Puppy is crap.

[CiaW]

"From my perspective, on older / slower hardware, the LVM makes it too slow. But again, others may have different experiences..."

Yep, it takes an extra second at start up.
And to re-install to change the partitions size only takes a day or so. lol

SJ

P. S. Puppy is crap.

I wasn't talking about startup, I was talking about using the system in general. When I first installed F7 several months back and re-installed for various reasons -- at least once it had LVM and I definitely noticed a difference in speed running various applications.