More Awesome Than You!

I have an ancient shitty computer (windows xp, 80gb hd, 128 mb ram, ect.) that I at one point tried to reformat and failed - I've since lost the windows xp disk. I was talking to a coworker about linux and complaining about the general lack of a second computer in the house when I realized that I may be able to salvage the old computer. As it is now it takes entirely too long to start up, and is probably so virus-ridden as to be unusable.

Questions: I have a partially-reformated hard drive. Is it possible to completely burninate my c drive? I came across killdisk (http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm); have any MATYians used this? What sort of results have you had?

Recommendations for Linux installs for a very low-end computer? Think of it as a netbook in desktop format: the specs are about the same.

I realize that this would probably be better suited to a computer support type forum, but I don't know of any that I'd trust.

Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/). That's all you'll need. Extremely user friendly, it's super easy to install, and it'll wipe the hard drive before it does if you tell it to. Perfect for internet browsing, word processing, and some casual games.

Yeah, that's basically a great candidate machine to wipe and turn into a Linux box, so you can use it as a router and many other things.

The only problem that I see with that is that I don't have enough RAM - it's saying it needs at least 256mb, my old rig has 128mb.

I've installed it on a machine with 128 before. Still works fine. Won't be as snappy but you can disable stuff you don't want/need once it's installed.

I'll give it a shot - its not like anything worse can happen to the computer than what's going on with it right now.

Linux doesn't need a lot of RAMs if you remove unnecessary things. Linux will happily run on a craptastic machine with 32 MBs of RAMs.

Oh, the good old days. I installed Slackware on my very first computer back in '97. I think it was a 486 DX with 32 MBs of RAM. WOW. I miss those days.

Debian (and Ubunto) is so much easier to install and set up.  :P

In those days I was a Mac. An previously-used school system black and white screen Mac. Good times. Lots of text-based build-your-own adventure games.

A couple years later I was computer-less again (not a good thing for a CS major) and my boyfriend and I found an old Mac Plus, a SCSI Zip drive to use as an external hard drive, and a 2400 baud modem. We kludged all of those things together, much to the astonishment of our CS instructor and I was screaming along the Internet at home again. WOW!  :D

Linux doesn't require a lot of RAM or processing power, even crappy little Linksys routers can run Linux.  What does require quite a bit of RAM is the graphical stuff, you may want to try something like LXDE or XFCE as a desktop environment if you find GNOME or KDE to be too slow.

As for distributions: I'd try Xubuntu or Debian with XFCE.  Only if those work should you try something like Arch Linux or Gentoo since those require more configuration in order to get a desktop.

I gave installing Ubuntu a shot and spent an gour being stuck at the 'pick a language' screen. I'll probably give it another go on my next day off so that I can just let it do its thing.