Just wondering…
There are several to a dozen “Linux for Dummies” versions out on Amazon.com. Apparently some versions come with a DVD and others do not. I found a Suse Linux 10 for Dummies in the Half-Priced Boookstore by Naba Barkakati that came with a DVD.
My question is I have a few old puters under 1 gig mhz and under 500 Mem. I’m wondering if it’s advisable to use some of these Linux for Dummies disks on these older machines? Can anyone comment on the reliability of these discs included in the “Dummies” books. Am I better off buying 10.3 or 11.0 from the Novell shop?
–joe 
10.0 won’t be getting any more updates from what I understand. it has passed the life support stage so people will find that there are no new updates to the system.
From that point I will say it is better to move to something more current
There is no reason to purchase those products aside from nostalgia. Those puters can run 10.3/11.0 just fine.
how little RAM do they have.
I think somewhere around 256 MB RAM may be the low end that OpenSuse will install on.
But really you wouldn’t want KDE or anything too small for RAM either.
Cryovac,
Thanks for this…I’d been interested to know if the old putes were tooooo out of date for the new OS’s.
Grego,
Right now, I have 2 800mhz with 256 RAM and 2 800mhz with 384 ram.
Perhaps I should add some ram to the 256ers, and install 10.3 or 11.0?
Thanks guys,
–joe
with 256 MB ram I am sure you can get the install to go provided you don’t run into some odd hardware situation unique to that laptop.
KDE will run on there, it will just take a bit longer to start an application but once it is running it will be not too bad.
But with only 256 MB if someone tried to run a few programs at the same time it would start to show the limitations.
512 MB is definately a much more comfortable amount of RAM for KDE and it will improve the operation of it quite a bit.
That is assuming you use a more full desktop like KDE or a Gnome.
If you go for XFCE the requirements are less, but I am not sure if that is as good of choice if you are letting newbies try it out since it isn’t as full of a desktop as KDE. The great thing is with Linux you can experiment to find out what works
If you create a swap partition before the install Suse will use it for the install on machines with 256 or less. I installed 10.3 on 2 boxes with 128 Mb with this method.
Here the link to where I got the Info Installation on old hardware - openSUSE
I am running 10.3 on a laptop with only 256Mb and 384Mb swap. The only problem I have is when running OpenOffice which makes running anything else at the same time difficult though not impossible. Otherwise I have no problems running several programs at the same time.
My parents run openSUSE 10.3 with KDE on an old 900 MHz AMD Athlon with 256MB RAM. It runs terribly slow, so better use a slim desktop like xfce on old machines.