I’ve had troubles as of late in my household. I had a motherboard go bad that was powering my Media Center PC. This PC is the center of the entire family entertainment with 30 GB of music, 50 GB of movies, and the ability to watch live TV. That immediately ceased when the BIOS chip failed on the mobo. I had to send in for a replacement. In the meantime, I’ve had to shift all of my computers around to compromise for this loss. This means that I lost my normal Linux (PCLinuxOS .92) computer (an old Celeron 900 Emachines). I now have the old PII 350 MHz. While I know it likes Slackware and Vector Linux the most…I have to try other distros out on it just to see what happens. After all, even Windows XP can install and run on this computer…so I’d like to see how some of the better Linux desktops will run on it. To give a quick rundown, here are the specs:
- ATI Rage Pro Video Card
- 512MB PC133 Crucial
- PII MMX 350 MHz
- Samsung 32X CDROM
- Western Digital 20 GB 5400 RPM Hard Drive
- Linksys 10/100 Network Card
- Sound Blaster 16
Even if my hand is forced in this round with the inclusion of such an old desktop system, I don’t mind. Let’s see how some of the big distros work using this PII 350 MHz shall we? I’m going to attempt to get a good desktop based distro running with an XFCE desktop. If a distro ships with Gnome, I can handle that as well…KDE won’t do though since it will run very slow on this PC.
PCLinuxOS
Unfortunately, this didn’t want to boot. It got stuck on searching for the loop image during bootup. I tried pumping down resolutions and not probing practically anything but it just wouldn’t boot. Every single boot option in my arsenal came up nil. I didn’t think this would work for me, but I just figured I’d give it a try. I know PCLinuxOS is cutting edge normally with the best Intel and AMD processors…but I just figured that I might be able to run it with XFCE powering the desktop. So, it seems that PCLOS is good for newer computers but not what the doctor ordered for older computers. Darn, I really wanted this one to work. Next up, SuSe 10.0…
Those of you who followed our experiment here at Yet Another Linux Blog followed my wife’s path as she test drove distros for their out of the box abilities. Those of you who stayed positive throughout this process also understood why some of the more popular distros did not rate well…simply because they do not have much done for you out of the box. The reason we chose rating out of the box is because most new users wont be able to install hardare and software easily without reading some documentation and those new users might become immediately frightened of the aspect of finding answers to ‘how to do this’. By having stuff done a user can gain confidence at the early and critical times of using a distro and then build on top of that. Therefore, we set out to find the best distro that came suited for a user like my wife. If you followed along, you also know that PCLinuxOS was rated the top distro. As promised, today we’ll chat with Texstar, the creator of PCLinuxOS.
Last night, Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary went on the old experimental computer. There was a bit of trouble with this and I won’t go into details on it (Per request, I’ll let Mrs.Devnet detail this with her review) but after getting things up and running, everything works fine. Look for a final rating for this one sometime next weekend. Mrs.Devnet really digs the look of Gnome…so Ubuntu may have a feather in its hat there.
Fedora Core 4 Test 1 went on the test machine 2 days ago. However, mrs.devnet has done little testing as of yet. Real life issues have taken over. For those that don’t know…I’m currently active duty military and am separating from the service this month. As you probably could guess, this means we’ll be moving soon as well as changing employers. Mrs.devent has been furiously planning our move whilst I am looking for employment in the Richmond, VA – Washington, DC area. So there hasn’t been a ton of development on the experiment. I have spoken to her and she promises action on the last two distributions…FC4 test 1 and Ubuntu-current…within the next week. Sorry for our readers…but of course, family will come first. So expect Fedora Core 4 Test 1 to post sometime this next weekend and Ubuntu the following week. Of course, as promised, we’ll take another look at the top 2 and pit them head-to-head against one another. Then we’ll crown the winner. Thus far, PCLinuxOS is in the lead with 10 out of 10 points awarded and SimplyMEPIS is right behind with 8 out of 10. Stay tuned this weekend for mrs.devnet’s review.
After a lengthy downtime this past weekend due to a server hard disk crash, we’re back up. I moved the server to a new machine this past week as well so we didn’t get time to install Fedora Core current for review either. Therefore, the next step in the experiment will happen on Wednesday when we go forward with Fedora Core current. Mrs.devnet will take a look at FC followed by Ubuntu current next week sometime. She’ll then pick the top two distros of all those reviewed. Then we will have <assume Charlton Heston-like booming voice> THE GREAT DISTRO DRAW DOWN!!!</assume>. Mrs.devent will crown the victor and we’ll have our winner of the “Best New User Linux Distro”
Where have we been?!?! Â What’s up with the experiment!?!? Â Well, let me tell you…Texstar has seemingly won over my wife with this distribution of Linux. As stated previously by her, she expected a glowing review of the distro and currently, she can’t get enough of PCLinuxOS. So, since this is such a great distro and it has interrupted the experiment a bit…mrs.devnet made me promise two things as far as the experiment goes… 1) Leave PCLinuxOS on the computer for about 10 days so I can use Limewire (massively fast speeds) 2) Since we’re spending so long on this one…I don’t want to do 3 more…so cut one distro from the list.