putting linux on my old xp machine

[aarondavid]

so I have a old dell OptiPlex gx270 with a intel pentuim 4 and the xp on it suck's I cant even go on youtube because of security certificate error's xp is slow and rubbish so I was wondering how I can get Linux on it

[aisle9]

32-bit OS for sure. A minimalist distro is a must, as very little will be able to run smoothly on a machine that old and underpowered (by modern standards). Lubuntu is a possibility. I had a GX270 set up with Puppy Linux for a while, using both Slacko Puppy and Lucid Puppy at various points. If you can adapt to the barebones nature of something like Puppy Linux, the system will still be usable, but performance in general won't be great for modern usage. YouTube will be a train wreck even at 480p if you don't have some kind of GPU in there.

[aarondavid]

I was also wondering how I whould get it onto a usb ?? I have rufus 

[aarondavid]

ill download puppy Linux rn

[aisle9]

2 minutes ago, aarondavid said:

I was also wondering how I whould get it onto a usb ?? I have rufus 

Universal USB Installed. Once you pick the distro you want, you'll have the option to visit a download link. Make sure you grab the 32-bit version and you're set. I've never had any issues with UUI, but for some PITA distros like Arch, Cloudready Chrome or (to a point) Manjaro, I prefer Rufus. Puppy could be downloaded to a pencil than you shove into your USB slot, and it would still run.

[aarondavid]

im getting bionicpup32

[Bitter]

It's not really worth the trouble to be honest, I've done this before with similar hardware and even with very light GUI Linux distro's the hardware just is not capable of doing any modern tasks. You'll be able to do very basic stuff more efficiently like word processing or browsing text only websites but anything else like Youtube or Facebook games just will be an absolute crawl. It's a socket 478 system so there's no upgrade path for it to dual core. At best you could see if the system can run a CPU with hyperthreading but the early Northwood and Prescott implementations of it are meh at best and a detriment at worst. Also that's a proprietary small form factor case so you can't even put better stuff inside of it. I'm not even sure if 512MB of RAM is enough for modern Linux distro's to have enough for a GUI and run a browser.

 

If you're just after a introduction to using Linux then it's fine for that, just don't expect a miraculously functional PC just because it's got light Linux on it now instead of XP.

[aisle9]

Just now, aarondavid said:

im getting bionicpup32

Haven't used that one, but I've never seen a Puppy Linux that couldn't be run on a potato. Make sure you're quoting when you reply to people--I'm only seeing this because I have this thread open in the background while doing other stuff.

[aisle9]

Just now, Bitter said:

It's not really worth the trouble to be honest, I've done this before with similar hardware and even with very light GUI Linux distro's the hardware just is not capable of doing any modern tasks. You'll be able to do very basic stuff more efficiently like word processing or browsing text only websites but anything else like Youtube or Facebook games just will be an absolute crawl. It's a socket 478 system so there's no upgrade path for it to dual core. At best you could see if the system can run a CPU with hyperthreading but the early Northwood and Prescott implementations of it are meh at best and a detriment at worst. Also that's a proprietary small form factor case so you can't even put better stuff inside of it. I'm not even sure if 512MB of RAM is enough for modern Linux distro's to have enough for a GUI and run a browser.

Puppy and TinyCore. Puppy runs on something like 64MB of RAM, and TinyCore has the most basic of basic UIs but is usable.

 

Now, running a browser well...

[aarondavid]

@aisle9 ok im trying to find the iso file now its downloaded

[aarondavid]

im sorry if tagging you wasn't the way to reply im super new here

[aisle9]

1 minute ago, aarondavid said:

@aisle9 ok im trying to find the iso file now its downloaded

Check your downloads folder or your desktop. I'd also suggest reading a guide on how to install Puppy to your desktop. It's an OS that really wants to be run directly off of a USB stick, but I've gotten better results out of installing it directly onto older hardware. It can be annoying to do, though.

 

Edit: Tagging works. It's just a matter of making sure that the person you're responding to gets a notification that you're talking to them.

[aarondavid]

3 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

Check your downloads folder or your desktop. I'd also suggest reading a guide on how to install Puppy to your desktop. It's an OS that really wants to be run directly off of a USB stick, but I've gotten better results out of installing it directly onto older hardware. It can be annoying to do, though.

 

Edit: Tagging works. It's just a matter of making sure that the person you're responding to gets a notification that you're talking to them.

ok ive just got it installed now

[Bitter]

2 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

Puppy and TinyCore. Puppy runs on something like 64MB of RAM, and TinyCore has the most basic of basic UIs but is usable.

 

Now, running a browser well...

Yep. Even a super light browser like Midori is tough on 512MB if you have a web page with a lot of assets or several tabs open at once. And there's just the straight up hardware limitations, HTTPS encryption in software on the fly on a Northwood Pentium 4 is not exactly on the fly. Semi modern CPU's with AES instructions in hardware or even multicore CPU's can handle it reasonably well enough but asking a Northwood to encode/decode several megabytes of webpage in real time just is not a real time process. Pages that should load in a few tenths of a second may take 10 seconds to load. Will it work, eventually, but it won't be a pleasant experience.

[aisle9]

2 minutes ago, aarondavid said:

ok ive just got it installed now

Go ahead and get it set up, head on over to the software marketplace (I think Puppy does it that way) and install a browser like Midori, ultra lightweight.

2 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Yep. Even a super light browser like Midori is tough on 512MB if you have a web page with a lot of assets or several tabs open at once. And there's just the straight up hardware limitations, HTTPS encryption in software on the fly on a Northwood Pentium 4 is not exactly on the fly. Semi modern CPU's with AES instructions in hardware or even multicore CPU's can handle it reasonably well enough but asking a Northwood to encode/decode several megabytes of webpage in real time just is not a real time process. Pages that should load in a few tenths of a second may take 10 seconds to load. Will it work, eventually, but it won't be a pleasant experience.

Yeah, I would never in a million years recommend someone use Northwood, Prescott, any of that in 2019, but if it's what you've got and you can't/don't want to upgrade, might as well throw the lightest stuff you can get at it. I take a sick pleasure in making a system from the Renaissance period into something sorta-kinda usable today.

[Bitter]

That's more like hardware from the dark ages, renaissance would be early core2 era parts which with even low end discrete graphics can be a perfectly acceptable internet and old games machine! A Q6700, GTX 650, and 4 or 8GB of RAM will do A LOT of stuff!

7 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

Go ahead and get it set up, head on over to the software marketplace (I think Puppy does it that way) and install a browser like Midori, ultra lightweight.

Yeah, I would never in a million years recommend someone use Northwood, Prescott, any of that in 2019, but if it's what you've got and you can't/don't want to upgrade, might as well throw the lightest stuff you can get at it. I take a sick pleasure in making a system from the Renaissance period into something sorta-kinda usable today.