What's a good Linux distro for an older PC?

Question

I'm new to Linux and I am interested in installing it on an older computer I have. I want to set a web server up, and install PHP and Perl on it.

My PC is an older HP Pavilion a255c, with an Intel Pentium 4 processor and 512 MB of RAM. I will probably add some more memory later. This PC is more like a sandbox than anything, but I would like to get started quickly with the OS.

Is there a particular flavor of Linux I would need to download because I have an old computer? I was thinking about Ubuntu, but I'm not sure what version to go with.

Answer 1

ubuntu is just fine. you grab the mini.iso, install only the stuff you need and done.

stay away from eye-fancy, eats up ram + cpu. if you want to have no gui at all, do not install anything that sounds like 'x'. if you want a little bit of gui, install something like fluxbox, openbox or something similar.

any other distro is fine as well, as long as you start minimal and grow as you need. every sane distro has a package manager. the name of it is different, the syntax of how to use it is slightly different but at the bottom they are all the same:

 % sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-perl2
 % sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5

(ubuntu's apt-get at work, will fetch needed runtime dependencies as well, apache2in this case)

what's important to keep in mind: the number of packages available in your distro is essentially the limit of how far you can go. the officially labeled 'lightweight' distros are a bit crippled in that aspect. if you start minimal with a bigger distro you can grow without much hustle, with the smaller ones you will end up either switching or compiling all your stuff yourself (which is ok if you want to learn, burn time or anything in between)

Answer 2

You can try:

Damn Small Linux

Crunchbang - extra light!

FVWM

Mint XFCE

Mint Fluxbox

Xubuntu - more lightweight than the regular edition

.. these, IMO are in increasing order of utilization requirements of RAM & CPU, I suggest you try them all .. each provides varying kinds of customization and features. I guess, you try each of these and only then choose the most suitable distro.

P.S: Avoid/Remove all Mono, Python, WINE, KDE-related stuff - they take up lot of RAM & CPU. Use text-based (as opposed to GUI stuff) so lesser memory is utilized.

Answer 3

Pretty much any of them. Ubuntu is a good choice. Or Suse, or Fedora. I use Gentoo. One of the nice things about Linux and its distributions is that they are very modular. You can layer on as much stuff as you want or need for any hardware, from no GUI at all to a full eye-candy 3D suite. So don't pick one based on what PC hardware you have, but rather base it on other things such as familiarity, support, package choices, etc.

Answer 4

Any distro will do, but you might want to consider a nice stable enterprise distro such as CentOS if will one day go live. CentOS is derived from RedHat. Good for servers.

Answer 5

Personally, I would go with Fedora.

Their initial installation will ask what you will want to use the system for. This is a very simple place to just select Desktop and Web Server environments and an hour later (for which you can walk away) you have a working system.

512 mb of ram is a lot for most linux systems and fedora will run blazing fast.

Answer 6

For a headless server (no gui, monitor, or keyboard), try Ubuntu 10.04 server. You will get an option to install the LAMP stack on installation, saving you some effort and configuration headaches. Works on my Pentium 3 home server.

Answer 7

A pentium IV is hardly 'old' in this context - i've successfully used a PIII 450 as a server. As far as ubuntu versions goes, ubuntu server works well - i prefer to use the LTS on production servers since i have longer support, but if you intend to wipe the server regularly it shouldn't matter.

alternately you can do a plain vanilla install off the 'mini' disk, and simply select the 'LAMP' server set of tasks from tasksel (which should pop up when you install).

If its a pure server, forget a gui. If you intend to use it for other things, openbox or some other lightweight window manager should be enough.

Answer 8

I would use Damn Small Linux because of its small memory and cpu requirements. After setting it up you could even shutdown the window manager and run it without the gui.

Get all the info you need at http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Answer 9

I rebuild and fix old computers from parts with linux. As fax as old is concerned I have Slitaz lo ram running on a Pentium MMX laptop. I also run a website for people who like fixing old pcs and laptops with linux. http://www.linux-for-old-computers.co.uk

Answer 10

I would grab the Ubuntu server install and choose "Minimal server install" by pressing F4 at the CD boot screen. Just follow the instructions while installing, at some point it will ask for optional server components to install:

At this screen choose the following:

• LAMP Server (Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python)
• OpenSSH Server (to manage the server via putty)

This makes for a very lightweight server. There is no GUI, so you will have to do everything by command line after the install, however, the installation of ubuntu will cover almost everything you described.

I am not sure how you would like to manage your web content, FTP or just a direct SAMBA/NFS share. I think you can select both at the optional component screen.