Name that distro!

[Mazer]

Hey guys. In the coming days I'll be assembling a computer from some really old parts and need some advice on which Linux distro would be my best bet.

When I say old, I mean my dad's old computer which I *think* is something like 350MHz (maybe less than that). It's got around 96mb of ram, and I think I can find a ~4gb hard drive for it.

All I need it to do is run SDL and 2D graphics with reasonable speed, and sound.
Bonus points for being able to boot straight to the X server without too much of a wait.

Because of the last point, I'm thinking Gentoo. But as with the specs I've pointed out, I'd rather not wait a week installing the OS.
Would another distro suit my needs here better?

[rizzix]

debian based distros have great legacy hardware support.. try ubuntu

or you can go with archlinux it is "optimised" for i686 processors.

[Mazer]

I'm almost certain that this processor wouldn't qualify as i686, but what do I know?

I was thinking Ubuntu at first, just because it's so easy to get things working. But the thing is, I'm building a dedicated DDR machine here. So supposing I, or even my dad, would like to go to the family room and play some DDR, waiting several minutes just to boot up wouldn't be so much fun. Does Debian boot faster than Ubuntu in your experience?

Also, I don't want to be bogged down by alot of extra things I won't be using enough for it to be worthwhile. For instance, I occasionally may want to put some new songs on the computer, but it'd probably be easier to stick them on a USB device than to keep the thing connected to the network all the time.

[rizzix]

the following platforms are considered i686:
Intel
* Pentium Pro
* Pentium II
* Pentium III
* Celeron
* Pentium 4
* Pentium M
AMD
* Athlon
* Athlon XP
* Duron
* Sempron

as listed in wikipedia: i686

The thing is,, i havn;t tried ubuntu. I did try debian, and let me warn you, the installation is not pretty. The OS is dead ugly. It is just plain horrible. Ok now that i've mentioned that, its speed was acceptable, nothing significant or outstanding.

hmm i was thinking of updating my SuSE (dont bother it requires an high-end pc) but i am (was) curious to try out ubuntu.. then again i think i might just install arch.. if your processor falls under any of those listed above.. i suggest you do the same

[Mazer]

rizzix wrote:

the following platforms are considered i686:
...

http://cpu-museum.de/?m=AMD&f=K6-2#cpu0173
Heh, what did you think I meant by "old?"

Perhaps I'll just keep looking for a bit. Nothing I can do now anyways, as I still need to find a damned ATX case in my basement so I can stick the mobo somewhere.

[rizzix]

The other OS i can recommend (that is lightweight) is opendarwin. But it is not linux, instead unix. It is more FreeBSD compatible than Linux compatible, although very very close. I've used it, its easy to use and fast. They have this thing called darwinports through which you can install various software.. although its not as easy to use as most linux disto's packaging systems.. it is not all that hard either. Hmm.. i'm not too sure about hardware compatibility though.. but if freebsd5 was compatible with a wide variety of hardware,, maybe darwin should be the same.

[wtd]

Damn Small Linux?

[Martin]

Windows 3.11?

[wtd]

Martin wrote:

Windows 3.11?

The hardware mentioned would run Windows 95, if you're going to go that route.

[rizzix]

woots, just installed arch linux.. i'm very satisfied... getting a graphics accelerated nvidia driver installed and working was pretty easy.. only problem right now is sound (alsa).. i'll figure that out eventually.

oh yea, its quite darn fast! woah!

the pacman packing system is very cool.. it feels like gentoo, but much faster!

[wtd]

rizzix wrote:

woots, just installed arch linux.. i'm very satisfied... getting a graphics accelerated nvidia driver installed and working was pretty easy.. only problem right now is sound (alsa).. i'll figure that out eventually.

oh yea, its quite darn fast! woah!

the pacman packing system is very cool.. it feels like gentoo, but much faster!

What kind of desktop environment are you using?

[rdrake]

Ubuntu worked fine on an old computer I had lying around (400 MHz, P2, 64 MB RAM, etc.), even with Gnome running. Kinda slow, but it still worked pretty well.

[Mazer]

wtd wrote:

Damn Small Linux?

I was about to look into that as well. The biggest positive for using Ubuntu is ease of setting up and the packages, and I'm now reluctant to give that up. But we'll see...

cartoon_shark wrote:

Ubuntu worked fine on an old computer I had lying around (400 MHz, P2, 64 MB RAM, etc.), even with Gnome running. Kinda slow, but it still worked pretty well.

Yeah... the "kinda slow" part sucks really. DDR isn't one of those games where noticeable hiccups can be ignored. Hopefully if I run something like blackbox instead of Gnome it can help the problem a bit.

[wtd]

Coutsos wrote:

cartoon_shark wrote:

Ubuntu worked fine on an old computer I had lying around (400 MHz, P2, 64 MB RAM, etc.), even with Gnome running. Kinda slow, but it still worked pretty well.

Yeah... the "kinda slow" part sucks really. DDR isn't one of those games where noticeable hiccups can be ignored. Hopefully if I run something like blackbox instead of Gnome it can help the problem a bit.

Apparently there's some work going on to produce an XFCE-oriented Ubuntu desktop (much like Kubuntu). That might give you better performance.

[betaflye]

rizzix wrote:

The thing is,, i havn;t tried ubuntu. I did try debian, and let me warn you, the installation is not pretty. The OS is dead ugly. It is just plain horrible. Ok now that i've mentioned that, its speed was acceptable, nothing significant or outstanding.

Ubuntu uses a modified version of the debian sarge installer, both Ubuntu and the testing branch of debian install quite easilly.