Newb Advice!

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Newb Advice!
started by: parallax

Posted by parallax on Dec. 30 2006,23:46

Hi

I am a newb to DSL and was wondering if I could get some advice? I have an old laptop which I’d like to use to run DSL, its specs are follows:

-Compaq Notebook 100
-475MHz AMD Processor
-28MB RAM
-4 Gb Hard Disk
-CD Rom & Floppy Disk

As a university student I’d like to use the laptop for some java programming, use open office to write up projects, use graphing apps like xmgrace for data analysis and maybe watch a few movie files streamed from a usb stick. I’ve used Cygwin and a few distributions of linux, but I haven’t had that much experience setting up a linux environment from scratch. Would DSL be a suitable os for what I’d like to do?

Thanks!

Posted by smag on Dec. 31 2006,02:09

Now, I'm a newb too, but it seems like the RAM is going to be a little low to watch vids and such. 28...you sure it's not 128? That would be a whole lot better. Otherwise everything else sounds good.

Not sure about open office and frugal dsl. The way I understand it, you can get other linux apps working easier if you did a regular HDD install instead of a frugal, but I've never done one.

I'd say try using DSL from a Live CD or a USB-key boot for a while, to test-drive it before installing it. See what works, what's slow, etc...

hope that helps

smag

Posted by parallax on Jan. 15 2007,14:12

Hey Smag

Thanks for the advice, that old laptop does indeed has 28MB RAM, I gave up in the end... it's just too old! So I'll try DSL on another laptop and see if I get more positive results that way, perhaps I might even be able to get WINE working for all those Windows apps I can't bare to part with!

Thanks