Journal Timex's Journal: Which distro to use? 12
I have an old laptop that was given me. It's a Sony Vaio PCG-F520...
It has Win2000 Professional on it, but I'd like to replace that with something a bit more...
Does anyone have any recommendations for a Linux distro that would work well on it? GUI is useful, but not necessary...
Ubuntu server? (Score:2)
And then you can apt-get whatever else you want on it (low-end gui, compliers, or whatever).
Either that or damn small linux. Though frankly these days I'd go with ubuntu.
I use opensuse (Score:2)
The hardware support for opensuse is pretty good; but that is a funky Sony that you have there.... I'd be inclined to leave it as is, and give it to a kid for games.
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A few years back I bought my wife a Sony PCG-GRZ610 (1 or 2ghz Intel, 256MB memory, ATI 7500) laptop and we have run Gentoo on it since. I'm not sure of the specs compared to the one you mention, but this one we bumped the memory up to 1GB about a year ago. I haven't had an issue with any of the hardware, such as for drivers, at all. Granted I never tried to use the modem or the special sony memory stick at all as I never had cause for either. Gentoo, requiring compiling for everything, would make the m
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I thought about that, but the system isn't terribly fast, and the LCD seems to be on its last legs (it flickers if you move it suddenly).
We've tried some of their (web) games, and many they won't run because current plugin requirements aren't available for Win2k.
I know that many more aren't available with Linux, but at least with Linux, I can use it. :)
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If you can image off the drive prior to the upgrade, there's no reason not to. I just found machines with 64 MB RAM to be painful. I surprised that Firefox on Windows doesn't have the right Flash support.
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Part is that I've been trying to upgrade FF, but 3.5.x doesn't support Win2k.
I think the big thing to remember here is that I'm not trying to justify keeping Win2k here on this beast... I've already decided I want to put Linux on it, but I'm just not sure which distro would work best on it without adding too much overhead.
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A long time ago, I used Peanut Linux on a smaller machine. That was pretty speedy. I think nowadays it is called Damn Small Linux. No idea if it supports Firefox. Does the Vaio have a webcam? One of my co-workers got a Vaio netbook (before netbooks were all the rage) and it came with a built in webcam. First time I saw that. Nice feature, but driver support in Linux would be tough.
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No, it doesn't have a webcam.
I'm thinking of turning this thing into a printserver for USB-connected printers, specifically an HP Laserjet 4MP.
If it has room, I'd also like to get bind going there for local stuff, and maybe a few web pages served out for my LAN.
I took a stab at getting Fedora 10 installed, and it seems to have worked. I really don't need more for this than what I've listed, so I'll be looking at paring out extraneous packages.
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Yes, I expect that it would make a fine print server. Would probably make a fine WebDav server for bookmark synchronization, too.
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WebDav server... :D You're BRILLIANT! That's a wonderful idea! :D
CentOS (Score:2)
CentOS is just Red Hat Enterprise without the Red Hat copyright strings. You can load it up full and proper or strip it down to your satisfaction. The latest version - 5.3 as of right now - is really a nice distro and we use it on some of our in-house systems here. If you work or have worked with RHEL 5 at all, CentOS is the same thing, just different splash screens.
SuSE is good if you want everything including the kitchen sink.
We have used DSL and other small distros too, with good results.
For a live-CD, i
MEPIS (Score:2)
One app for each function. Warren Woodford was on the NextSTEP team with Steve Jobs.
They used to have Antix for older machines (not that I think your machine is that old.)
Get it here [mepis.org].