Hey guys! I have recently converted to Linux after taking a system architecture course which exposed me to OpenSuse. I have my main desktop up and running with OpenSuse and now I’m determined to dust off my old pc’s at home and get them up and running again. I might need some guidance or tips along the way so thats why I’m here…
I have four old pc’s running on Windows Home XP with 512mb or less of ram. I am planning on upgrading them to at least 1 or 2gb of ram to get as much as I can out of OpenSuse. Should I install the ram before I before or after switching them all to OpenSuse? What network adapter do you guys recommend? Any procedure or steps you guys would recommend to a newbie?
These are the pc’s I’m planning to work on with their specs…
Well, you probably allready know that the swap partition on the pc needs to be at least the size of the ram. As long as you keep that in mind it really won’t matter if you do it before or after. As for the network adapter, i would suggest you try something like realtek or via or anything that is not too obscure that goes 10/100. However judging by the pc’s you are going to use, the only thing left to worry is if your graphic card drivers are still up-to-date available or legacy. That is if you prefer lot’s of eye-candy and gaming on those machines. That for the recommending.
Linux is a very versatile os, and so far it worked with every bit of crappy hardware that i bought either because it was cheap, either because i got it free. As long as you’ve got enough ram so you won’t have high loading time for apps, you should be ok.
With a good amount of RAM on each of these they should be OK, you may want to consider a lightweight desktop like LXDE on the HP being relatively low spec, with a maximum of 512 MB of RAM.
I am planning on upgrading them to at least 1 or 2gb of ram to get as much as I can out of OpenSuse. Should I install the ram before I before or after switching them all to OpenSuse?
On systems that have enough RAM to install Linux you can easily add the RAM after install, it will be automatically detected by Linux.
No hardcore gaming on these pcs, they are going to be used primarily for research or word processing. Just some extra computers that my siblings can use while I’m away at college. Thanks for the input !
I have an old HP; I think its an e40 or something. It has a sub-GHz Celeron processor, 512 MB of ram and onboard Intel video. Until about opensuse 11.2, I had it running with 256 MB of ram. At that point, I had to up the memory. I just installed 11.4 RC1 with KDE 4.6 from a Live-CD. I have to do this, since it has no DVD drive. Installing took HOURS. But, once installed, it runs nicely. You can’t game on a machine like this but it will do the basics that you are looking for. BTW, after the first few minutes of the install, you can walk away and let it do its thing.
On 02/20/2011 04:36 AM, CLuu09 wrote:
>
> Should I install the ram before I before or after switching them all to OpenSuse?
yes, 512 is listed as the MINIMUM ram for openSUSE 11.3, 1 GB
recommended…and, you will be MUCH happier with a full gig…
and, by the way, there is only one way to spell the name of our
distribution, the trademarked way: openSUSE
short list of wrong ways (for your amusement and enlightenment):
OpenSUSE
OpenSuse
openSuse
openSuSE
opensuse
open SUSE
etc
–
DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[NNTP posted w/openSUSE 11.3, KDE4.5.5, Thunderbird3.0.11, nVidia
173.14.28 3D, Athlon 64 3000+]
“It is far easier to read, understand and follow the instructions than
to undo the problems caused by not.” DD 23 Jan 11
For any PC where your plan to upgrade the RAM fails, you could look at a desktop OTHER than KDE or Gnome. There are a number of liveCDs for derivative versions of openSUSE here: Derivatives - openSUSE ie desktops such as Xfce, LXDE, and Enlightenment (Petite Linux) require less RAM. From experience, I can attest that LXDE does run with less RAM. I have not tried XFCE recently, but Petite Linux aims to do the same.
To install openSUSE Linux on a PC with less memory may require the installation be done in Text mode (although the final results will be with GUI desktop). There is guidance here for that: Text mode install from liveCD
Well with 512 mb ram the installer should start fine in GUI mode. Tried that myself. Although oldcpu is right, if you can’t upgrade the ram, or can’t afford to upgrade all at once, you can try a different desktop. I’d recommend enlightenment. I’ve worked with that before and is quite stable and has a lot of fancy eye-candy at very low resource cost.
I just started using xfce, and I don’t see much difference between it and gnome.
I’m running 11.2, 2.6.31.14-0.6, gnome 2.28.2 with 256MB of RAM on an 11-year-old AMD Athlon XP 2500+, and most things run at a comfortable speed. The system crawls only when I browse commercial web-sites with lots of graphics. My graphics card is an nVidia GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8X. I’m using the nv driver.
>
> Do you think SUSE would run on the HP which has an Intel Celeron 800
> MHz processor?
>
I have 11.2 running on an Intel PIII, 866MHZ with 768MB memory (max for
machine) Very slow but it runs.
A friend gave me an old Dell Dimension 4600 with 2.6GHz Pentium4 and 512Mb RAM. It took the OpenSUSE 11.3 happily and I am using it right now. I have already ordered the memory upgrade and it will be installed in a few days.
