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What operating system for an old computer

prodigydoo
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Hey guys, 

 

I found an old computer on the side of the road yesterday, brought it home and WOW it booted!

 

It has an AMD Duron cpu, 500mb DDR2 ram, no Hard drive and a really old ATI looking graphics card (I cant get a model)..

 

 

The computer had no hard drive, and I just want to use it for a few months as a HTPC, just to play tv shows and movies..

 

 

 

I need an operating system that i can boot and run from a USB drive and it obviously needs to support the old hardware..

 

First thing i tried was Ubuntu.. I got errors when it was loading files..

 

I then tried another linux distro that was supposably better at running on old/slow PC's  and again this didnt work..

 

 

Does anyone have any suggestions on what i could try loading on there..  

 

The computer has an XP sticker on the side so im assuming it can run that, but i havent found a way to run XP from a USB

 

 

Im thinking chromium??

 

 

O and i only have a 16gb USB drive, If i can do it on an 8GB one then thats better  (I dont want to store anything on there, the movies are on an external hard drive)

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Try Slackware or distros based on Slackware, like VectorLinux or Puppy Wary.

 

VectorLinux is easy to install, I would start with that, you also need no prior knowledge to use it, it uses XFCE as DE, it looks like Windows2k but with a dock like MacOS.

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Try Slackware or distros based on Slackware, like VectorLinux or Puppy Wary.

 

VectorLinux is easy to install, I would start with that, you also need no prior knowledge to use it, it uses XFCE as DE, it looks like Windows2k but with a dock like MacOS.

 

 

Thanks, VectorLinux was that other one I tried...

It didnt boot.. Ill give puppy wary a try :P

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Thanks, VectorLinux was that other one I tried...

It didnt boot.. Ill give puppy wary a try :P

If VectorLinux didn't boot, no need to try something else, I can tell you right now the problem is your BIOS doesn't support boot from USB.

 

This can be remedied though, check out: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

It will solve all your problems, I know because that's exactly how I got linux via USB on an old Toshiba laptop.

 

Good luck!

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If VectorLinux didn't boot, no need to try something else, I can tell you right now the problem is your BIOS doesn't support boot from USB.

 

This can be remedied though, check out: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

It will solve all your problems, I know because that's exactly how I got linux via USB on an old Toshiba laptop.

 

Good luck!

 

 

hmm, I'm not sure if it doesn't support usb booting, because I can get to that purple linux splash screen where it shows an image of a keyboard down the bottom.. its after that, where it starts running through various processes (text coming up on screen) that it gets errors and freezes

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Its odd that you are getting errors loading Linux distro's as the hardware you are using is all well supported. have you tried loading a live Linux install from a different USB stick? 
 
As Zoltan has said above things like VectorLinux work well with older systems compared to  the window manage you will find in Ubuntu which quite a beats to run on older graphics cards. if you want to use this PC as a media centre I would recommend Mythbuntu  http://www.mythbuntu.org/ its still Ubuntu (so a well supported release) but its not got those window manager issues. 
 
Your machine would work well with XP as well but not without a hard drive, if you are more savvy with windows that maybe the way to go. XBMC will run great in windows XP (or at least did last time i used it, many years ago now.) Maybe consider just getting a cheap IDE hard drive off e-bay to make your life easier. :)
 
I hope this helped. 

 

 

I have looked into XMBC, from the small amount of time I looked at it, it seemed relatively graphics intensive, so immediately I thought it wouldn't run smoothly/properly/at all..  Would this be the case? or did I just get a completely wrong first impression lol?

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tried Linux Puppy but never got to install it propperly

then tried Crunchbang

 

Worked like a charm

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tried Linux Puppy but never got to install it propperly

then tried Crunchbang

 

Worked like a charm

 

Thanks I'll add that to my list to try ;)

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CrunchBang should work. I have the whole OS installed on my USB, slow at times but it works. I would put a live CD on it though because they tend to have more driver support.

Do you want to know what grinds my gears?
The old forum.

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I've tried installing ubuntu on a 14 year old pc and it worked great(I was surprised it could boot of usb) but had A LOT of graphic issues. Then put Linux mint on it and it ran fine,but ended up using xubuntu. It's currently running a ps1 and snes emulator on it with a ps3 controller. I would recommend damn small Linux but I can never get it to work right so try xubuntu.

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Ubuntu runs well on my laptop. I'm not aware of the performance of the Duron CPUs but it can't be much worse than an Intel Pentium Dual Core. That's what my laptop has. Laptop is about 4-5 years old. Something like that.

"It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out." - Carl Sagan.

"I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you" - Edward I. Koch

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Puppy Linux is a TINY! OS and can be run of the RAM :D it's rather excellent really.

 

wow.. off the ram.. Thats really impressive, Must be incredibly fast

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I will just add to what others have said.  Puppy Linux.  I am not a Linux guy and had no problem getting it to work.

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It depends on the configuration of your computer if its to old like P4 or P3 you can use the Windows XP SP1 for your system

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Thanks for all the suggestions..  I got a small hard drive and im thinking of putting puppy os on it.. ;)

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great, crunchbang is the way to go for a stable and decent OS

I have it on an old HP DV1000 wioth a celeron processor, no complains

 

BUT

 

I will give ReactOS a try, Just because the Full windows compatibility

I tried it before and it was fast and small (about 50mb installer)

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