[wellylug] Resurrected Ubuntu

[John Durham]

On 9/07/2010 3:40 p.m., Andrew Tarr wrote:
>
>
>> After a bit of effort I finally got Ubuntu to start on an older PC. It
>> had been sitting in the office as a backup web server for several years.
>> Now it is alive, but not doing much. A menu appears after login, but
>> nothing much happens when selected etc. Is it worth working on as a
>> secondary system?
>> --
>> Regards, John Durham
>
> I think we'd probably need more information on the actual specifications of said system before we could give much in the way of advice.
>
> I have Ubuntu 8.10 (two whole version numbers behind the current Ubuntu now) on an IBM Thinkpad R31, which is now several years old, it was released in 2002. I think it has a 1 GHz Celeron and 300-odd Mb of RAM. Maybe it's 500 Mb, I can't remember. The OS runs fine, Firefox works, but Firefox plus anything else much slows down the machine to a swap-thrashing crawl.
>
> I would say your chances of running regular Ubuntu acceptably on anything with much lower specs than this are not good - at a guess I'd say 800Mhz and 500 Mb of RAM are really a practical lower limit if you're intending on running anything remotely memory-hungry (like that filthy hog Firefox).
>
> However, you could try one (or several!)  of the 'lite' distributions based on Ubuntu, such as Lubuntu or U-lite.  These should be enough like regular ubuntu for generic ubuntu skills, documentation and advice to be quite applicable. Supposedly these can work on as little as 128 Mb of memory.  There are lighter-weight browser options, too, such as Galeon.
>
> (Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu branch, U-lite is not, for what it's worth. There's another official branch, Xubuntu, which is also supposed to be light-weight but apparently isn't.)
>
> -Andrew.
The system is an older one. Searching for markings I found KM400A PRO. 
Since the contents were not critical I decided to re-install Ubuntu. Now 
new user and password information is set. The install will be finished 
within the hour. At that time the success or otherwise will be known.

-- 
Regards, John Durham
Fax/Phone 64 4 5286786
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