Yet another "What distro works for x" thread

pseudonomous · 2008-11-04 17:10:37

Hello Everybody,

I'm looking for a good OS for an older machine (Intel Celeron c. 2000, box says "designed for Windows 2000 / Windows ME"), all it really needs to do is connect to a printer via USB, run a full-featured web-browser, mount portable usb drives, and run a word processor.

The characteristics I would like to see in the OS, in rough order of importance, would be:

0-is not Ubuntu / will actually install on the system
1-reasonably lightweight (although this box has run Ubuntu in the past), ideally you can start from a base system and build up from there
2-easy for users to use (i.e. this thing should run Gnome, XFCE, KDE, or LXDE ... I'm leaning toward XFCE)
3-provides good documenation (like the Arch Wiki)
4-is reasonably up to date
5-Provides a flash-player
6-is easy to admin post install+configuration.
7-has a BSD style init system

Formerly this thing ran Ubuntu, but it fails to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 and fails to complete both the text-based installer and GUI installer (it mysteriously fails at the "installing packages" stage). Currently it runs Debian Stable, more or less becuase that's what I had with me besides Ubuntu CDs, but I'm not too happy with this becuase:

1) I don't know anything about Debian and their documentation IMO can be hard to read.
2) The packages are really old
3) There's some sort of bug that makes the window bar for Open Office look srewed up, it's not a killer-bug, but I'd like something that looks proffessional.
4) Despite downloading flash-player and running the install script, flash doesn't work. Maybe with some more work I could get it to run, but I would really rather be in a situation where flash runs "out-of-the-box" and is in fact provided as a package in the distro repositories.

I won't be adminning the thing, myself, otherwise I would definately just put arch on it, the person taking care of it is my mom, and while she's capable of learning how to configure Arch, I just don't think she has the time to devote to this. On the other hand, I know Arch pretty well, so I could probably walk her through anything she needs to do.

I think what would be nicest is something like FreeBSD, where alot of configuration can be done using the "Sysintall" utility, which is menu-driven and fairly easy to figure out how to use. The reason why I didn't use FreeBSD is that it can also lag pretty far behind in providing ports and flash doesn't work natively.

I've never used anything besides Arch, Ubuntu, PClinuxOS, Debian, Zenwalk, and FreeBSD, so I was wondering if anybody who's tried OpenSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, or CentOS had any thoughts on the suitability of these distros in terms of the criteria above.

Thanks!

R00KIE · 2008-11-04 17:52:24

Well you could just put Arch, make it all work nice and tidy and forget about updates (if it works don't fix it).
Personally I don't like OpenSUSE and Fedora (just got on my nerves as soon as I installed them) Mandriva might be ok. Forget about CentOS, its just like Debian on the packages department but based on Redhat, plus the packages available from the gui are almost none.
I've tried quite a few distros (just for a few hours most of them) and most are either too bloated and slow, messy, too hard to use (because everything is scattered all over the place and GUI's are almost mandatory) or they have outdated packages.
You are better off with Arch in my opinion.

pseudonomous · 2008-11-04 18:04:43

R00KIE wrote:

Well you could just put Arch, make it all work nice and tidy and forget about updates (if it works don't fix it).

I'm a bit uncomfortable with that, because the box will probably need to be updated at SOME point and if you're upgrading EVERY installed package and something breaks it will probably be a lot harder to backtrace what caused the problem. Updating once every one/two weeks on the weekend might be doable, though, If something breaks and my mom can't fix it, I could probably look at it on the weekends. For that reason, I lean toward Arch as a solution, becuase I don't honestly know enough about any other distro that I could be confident I could fix most of the things that can go wrong.

R00KIE · 2008-11-04 19:03:26

Well ... true eventually you want to update but if it is for your mom to use not so many worries, as long as the programs she uses are working fine and do what she wants she couldn't care less if its the latest package or not, at least I see it that way. I'm saying this because I have a little experience with it. My dad doesn't care of how old or new a program is, if the program he wants is there and works he's happy.

Ashren · 2008-11-04 19:32:37

EDIT: Sorta missed that you have used Zenwalk in the past.

Hmm.. Zenwalk would pretty much fit the bill.
It is based on Slackware.
It has graphical package manager.
It even comes with Xfce.
And it's pretty fast on old hardware.

Have you considered Puppy?

And what about Vector Linux?

Crux is the only other Linux distro with a BSD-style init I can think of.

Last edited by Ashren (2008-11-04 19:35:58)

pseudonomous · 2008-11-06 00:51:54

Thanks for the replies, Ashren & ROOKIE

I've decided probably just to go with Arch. I installed the base system + Xorg and XFCE yesterday, unfortunately, for some reason now the Xserver keeps locking up whenever I start X. (Although I could startx and run twm just fine BEFORE I installed XFCE). Hopefully, with some fiddling I w/ Xorg I can get it to work, after which point it should be fine until the next Xorg.

Well ... true eventually you want to update but if it is for your mom to use not so many worries, as long as the programs she uses are working fine and do what she wants she couldn't care less if its the latest package or not, at least I see it that way. I'm saying this because I have a little experience with it. My dad doesn't care of how old or new a program is, if the program he wants is there and works he's happy.

Yeah, you're probably right, my issue is that some of the stuff really should be up to date, like the web-browser and plugins, and I can't really choose just to update some stuff (well I CAN, but that takes more work) and not update other stuff. So since it's probably best to have a recent version of firefox it's probably best just to keep the whole system up to date. Also: my mom's technically literate enough to know that not applying security updates to windows is a bad idea, and I don't want her to get into the bad habit of assuming that just because she runs linux on a computer, it means that it's magically protected from malware.

Have you considered Puppy?

Yes, and also DSL, but of the truly small solutions, SliTaz looked the best, to me. This level of minimalism is probably more than necessary, though. On the other hand, maybe I should grab something like this and keep it on CD to use as a fallback OS.

cardinals_fan · 2008-11-06 02:56:05

SliTaz will be awesome, but printing is a bit screwy at the moment. If you get that working, I highly recommend it.

ghoti · 2008-11-06 05:10:05

Aside from Arch, which is an obvious choice , you might consider Dreamlinux (DL). This is a distro based on Debian Lenny, fast, easy to use and configure. I have installed DL 3.3 on a number of desktops and laptops, and almost everything worked out of the box on all of them, including an 8-year old AMD 1200 MHz with 256 Mb of Ram and a 32 Mb Nvidia GeForce MMx. Some are using it on PIII with 192 Mb of ram. They are currently working on a release candidate (DL3.5r4) with the expectation to have a final version available by the end of the year. Xfce is the default Desktop Environment in this release candidate, but there is a script available to install Gnome. And from what I understand, there should also be a Lxde and a Fluxbox version available at some point.

Another choice is Ubuntulite, though it is based on Ubuntu 8.04 (which might be an issue for you if you had problems before). It uses Lxde as the desktop environment, and Hardy's repos. On that old AMD, it uses about 70-90 Mb of ram at startup, which is similar to Arch with Lxde on that computer, though Arch seems to be faster .

Good luck,
Ghoti

SiC · 2008-11-06 18:03:22

I'd vote arch, then when you want to upgrade, start with the kernel, and then just update slowly. No reason to do a full -Syu. Although a number of people have reported no problems doing that after extended periods of time.

I don't update my desktop too often (once a month or so) as I work from it too much, and to lose my ability to work would be catastrophic.

thisperishedmin · 2008-11-06 19:03:23

in my honest opinion, i've always found that arch takes a good bit of setup initially, but seems to work the easiest down the line. ive had less problems with updates, things strangely breaking, and so on when I use arch. Given all of this, you just may be better off putting her on arch.

in the end, she'll need to do some learning about whatever system she is using - so why not have her use something youre most familiar with to provide assistance?

either way - good luck

GERGE · 2008-11-06 19:12:52

There is Pardus. You could try it.

pseudonomous · 2008-11-10 04:35:38

For anyone interested, the install is now more/less complete and it's Arch. The problem that was causing X to flake was something with mesa, I think, adding the "noaccel" option eliminates the problem.

The desktop had more RAM then I thought, 512 Mb, so I went ahead and installed Gnome, everything that needs to work immediatly seems fine. Thanks for everybodies suggestions.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-11-04 17:10:37

Yet another "What distro works for x" thread

#2 2008-11-04 17:52:24

Re: Yet another "What distro works for x" thread

#3 2008-11-04 18:04:43

Re: Yet another "What distro works for x" thread

#4 2008-11-04 19:03:26

Re: Yet another "What distro works for x" thread

#5 2008-11-04 19:32:37

Re: Yet another "What distro works for x" thread

#6 2008-11-06 00:51:54

Re: Yet another "What distro works for x" thread

#7 2008-11-06 02:56:05

Re: Yet another "What distro works for x" thread

#8 2008-11-06 05:10:05

Re: Yet another "What distro works for x" thread

#9 2008-11-06 18:03:22

Re: Yet another "What distro works for x" thread

#10 2008-11-06 19:03:23

Re: Yet another "What distro works for x" thread

#11 2008-11-06 19:12:52

Re: Yet another "What distro works for x" thread

#12 2008-11-10 04:35:38

Re: Yet another "What distro works for x" thread

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