My parents have an old PC primarily used for web browsing that is currently running Linux. This PC works reasonably well with a light desktop, however it is not capable of booting from DVD or for that matter a USB flash drive, only from CD or hard drive.
After a series of contortions, my cousin successfully installed Mint 15 Olivia. Unfortunately, this version of Mint no longer has distro repositories available and Mint apparently does not support an in-place upgrade option like “zypper dup” provides for Suse.
Compounding difficulties, this PC is hooked to the Internet over a reasonably slow wireless connection. This makes me wonder what the best approach would be for installing OpenSuse on this machine. Is it still possible to boot off a old fashioned 650mb CD-ROM and perhaps install files that downloaded (or copied over) in advance to the hard drive? For that matter is it possible to boot off a CD-ROM and then swap in a DVD with the install media? I remember the good old days of sitting by the PC with a stack of floppies to install software; does this option still exist?
Is there a good network install option if this PC were temporarily moved near the router and given a wired connection? I would like to upgrade the PC to Suse 13.2, but I do not want to take a working PC and render it unbootable.
Anyone have any advice or good explanatory links? For that matter has anyone loaded a recent Suse release like 13.2 on underpowered hardware and have cautionary tales about problems?
Thanks in advance for not saying “buy a new computer”.
Placing DVD ISO image on hard disk, directly loading installation kernel from it using loopback support in syslinux or grub2 and installing off this DVD is also an option. Of course it means hard disk cannot be repartitioned during installation.
Hmm … grub2 with direct USB support (not via BIOS) may be able to see external USB device and after kernel is loaded it sure should be able to access image on it as well. Worth a try; installation over slow internet connection is not that reliable.
Processor Speed: 3 GHz
System Bus: 800 MHz
System Memory: 400 MHz
L2 Cache Ram: 1 MB
Total Memory: 2048 MB
Memory Mode Dual Channel
Hmm, I am not sure on the what type of USB is present.
Btw, has anyone else noticed that Mint decided that the program to check system/hardware specifics was too technical and dropped it from the standard install. How unhelpful is that when preparing for an install. I had to check the BIOS instead. I hope SuSE avoids the temptation to become that simple user friendly.
You can try Plop Boot Manager here Plop Boot Manager 5.0 - Download. It lets you boot off a CD or hard drive and can chainload to USB after. Then try upgrading with the DVD image dd’ed on the flash drive from there for an offline upgrade.
As for 13.2 on underpowered hardware, it works well. I have an old C2D with 1GB of RAM and it works, but a bit slow on multitasking. Wouldn’t recommend KDE on that; try XFCE, then enable zram with around 512MB.
