Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Linux Installation Fun

The other day I pulled out an old crusty beige PC from my parents' closet. It's an old AMD K6 350 MHz with 128 MB RAM, and a 6 GB HD. I figured I might as well make use of it since it was just sitting there. After pulling it apart and spraying out the dust with the ol' compressed air can, I enthusiastically took it home to try to install Suse Linux. The install went great, but after rebooting, I got nothing but a white screen, or a non-working mouse. Nice. Hoping that somewhere the drivers for my old legacy hardware would be there I tried other Linux distributions. I got the same thing with Red Hat (Fedora) and a number of bootable, live Linux CD's such as Knoppix, SLAX. Determined to succeed, I downloaded Ubuntu Linux (after reading about the many Linux distributions available on http://www.distrowatch.com). I am currently installing Ubuntu with my fingers crossed. If this doesn't work I will probably scrap the whole thing and throw Windows 98 back on it!

3 comments:

  1. Ubuntu installed okay (actually a very simple install), but when it booted up, I got a fuzzy/noisy, garbled image. I need to figure out how to tweak the video settings. (sigh) I'm running out of steam with Linux. Although, I am going to try Xandros Linux and see how that goes, since it is supposedly the most user-friendly distro.

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  2. Forget the Linux and install Windows 9x! :)

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  3. Ubuntu wins! Even though I had to do a CTRL+ALT+F1 to get to a command prompt to edit xorg.conf, set my serial mouse to ttyS0 and force the trident video driver. Thanks to this article, I was able to get Ubuntu Linux working on the ol' crusty beige box! W00t!

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