I keep seeing posts about running Ubuntu on “this old computer” — and then the poster goes on to talk about an 800Mhz Pentium III computer! 😯
PEOPLE! Listen to yourselves! That computer was new five years ago! THAT’S NOT OLD! THAT’S STILL FUNCTIONAL!
You just think it’s not functional because software companies and computer retailers don’t want you to think it will still work.
It will. You can make it work.
And if you can’t, give it to someone who will. 👿
Okay. Sorry. I’m done. Rant off.
Motho ke motho ka botho 
I run a public web server on a Pentium 2 with Ubuntu 🙂 It’s Dapper but it’s also breezy. Sorry for the pun 🙂
Yeah my 800Mhz Pentium III runs perfectly fine! I’m still tinkering about to make it faster. I USE KDE!!! (For those that think KDE is too ‘intensive’!)
Until just recently, the only computers I have ever owned were ones given to me by people throwing them away. I mean literally taking them to the dumpster. I now have a p4 2.6Ghz with 2GB ram….and it’s overkill. Other than playing WoW (In Windows…[please don;t shoot me!), it’s just not as fun.
I have a computer that’s around 800mHz mark and with 256 megs of ram, but no matter what I do with the thing it never seems to have the snappiness I need.. or want anyway. Right now it’s running Xubuntu Edgy, and that’s decently fast. I’ve tried using fluxbox and other lower end stuff, and even installed fluxbuntu, but it kinda seems like a pain in the butt to have to type a command in the command line to be able to use my usb stick, etc. It’s little things like that. Anyway, I was wondering if you could off the top of your head type a “sudo aptitude install …” for a decent-looking, fast desktop environment that would be useable on this machine. I’m looking to start over from a base command line install of edgy.
Hi Matt. Xubuntu is a good start, but I’m with you when you say it’s not as snappy as it ought to be. It started out as an option for older computers but it has matured to a point that it’s on par with Kubuntu or Ubuntu, in my opinion.
There are a lot of options available; unfortunately a lot of them will require a some setting up. If you want something that’s fast and good looking, try out FVWM-Crystal; if you tried Fluxbox but didn’t care for it, there’s still Openbox and IceWM that are good starting points.
None of those are a full-fledged desktop, but that’s why they’re so fast. If you want to get things like automounting USB drives going, it will take an extra step to get it going, but the effort is worth it.
My first run at using Ubuntu was on an 800 MHz, PIII machine. It was faster than the 1.1 GHz with Fedora Core 4/5. The deciding factor of switching to Ubuntu was everything actually worked on Ubuntu.
Now, like you, I have fun with the idea of “How long can I keep this machine not just running, but running well?” I wrote an entry about it in my blog.
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@Matt: I’ve found Enlightenment (without all the fancy effects) and IceWM pretty fast. You might want to give those a shot. Enlightenment DR17 is very pretty.
Yeah Enlightenment is pretty darn cool, but it’s REALLY unstable for me.. it crashes almost every time I open the applications menu with a message that says “This is very bad.” lol
I thought I found the perfect match for this computer in installing Zenwalk, but I tried installing XChat from it’s TERRIBLE package manager, only to have it corrupt xorg, so it’s temporarily hosed right now until I find some motivation to get around to fixing it.
I’m using Edgy on my laptop right now, which is my main computer and it runs just fine, but seems to take up alot of ram in comparison to when I’m using say Fluxbuntu on my 566mHz emachine.
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