Heres the Hardware. Need distro

860 Views 23 Replies 9 Participants Last post by thiussat, Mar 5, 2009

OcCam

Discussion Starter · Mar 3, 2009

I am looking at resurrecting a Dinosaur....

And Im looking for a distro that can do alot of things without being too complicated. I am a Linux virgin....

I would like to use [email protected], Browse the internet, play flash based games, (for the kids of course..

) maybe a little gaming, and just generally play with Linux.

My hardware will be:
MSI K7N2 delta-L or DFI nf2 U400s-AL motherboard
AMD Athlon xp 2800+ (Barton or T-Bred cant quite remember)
1gb ddr400 dual channel
2x 3gb HD not in raid (ebay might upgrade me to 40 ish gb)

AND I need some help here:

Radeon 9200se or geforce 4200 Ti

So lets play WHATS MY DISTRO!!!!

thanks for any help you can give guys

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1 - 20 of 24 Posts

chemicalfan

· #2 · Mar 3, 2009

It's sad, but Ubuntu has gotta be the number one choice for a Linux noob. Actually, I'd pick Xubuntu as it's a bit more lightweight. I've found that much of the knowledge of Linux comes from asking users how to do things - there are manuals, but they tend to leave out loads of stuff. If you ask people where they get their information, they'll just say experience!

Err, drifted off a bit there - I vote for Xubuntu as it's lightweight, should work without too much trouble, and has a great community forum for help

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error10

· #3 · Mar 3, 2009

Where are the specs for the dinosaur you said you were resurrecting? All I saw were specs for a not too old AMD rig which only needs about $50 worth of upgrades....

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murderbymodem

· #4 · Mar 3, 2009

That's not a dinosaur...a few of my friends still run rigs like that...

As for your videocard, both the choices you listed are pretty bad, unless those are the 2 you already have?

chemicalfan

· #5 · Mar 3, 2009

Just noticed the lack of HD space - maybe go for a liveCD distro? Puppy will save the 'state' to HD when you shutdown, so changes will be saved when you power off (unlike traditional liveCD distros like Knoppix)

I'm not great on liveCD distros, but they have minimal HDD impact, and might be good if you've only got 6gb combined

OcCam

Discussion Starter · #6 · Mar 3, 2009

lol, Error, its my dinosaur, I actually have 3 of these rigs floating around, but 1 has a soltek MB with BAD caps.

About the HDD space, Ebay may upgrade me to a 40 gig, if not I do have an 80 gb Eide in my sig rig with my old XP install on it. I have booted to it twice in the last year so that is an option as well.

But back to the rig, I was thinking of A 512mb swap on each drive, one drive for OS and one drive for programs. I wasnt thinking that the OS would need a whole lot of space anyway since I can run XP on these drives and still have room for kids games and what not

And the video cards. yes I know they suck but I cant find it in me to pay $70-100 to get a PCI 8400 or 8500 PCI card and they are pretty scarce on ebay. Canadian prices suck.. and the exchange rate is in the toilet.

And I know that I could get an AGP card, However, to get a card that can fold means going ATI, whose newer AGP cards are not well supported+would need all of the single core CPU for one client of [email protected] And they are also expensive and semi rare

If I go with PCI Nvidia card I can do GPU2 and CPU uniprocessor .....maybe. And a guy should always keep a PCI video card around (break glass in case of emergency)

Any way I guess the question would be, Is the 4200ti going to work in linux? I know that the radeon will, under protest, but the 4200ti is a more powerful card.

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murderbymodem

· #7 · Mar 3, 2009

Generally Nvidia's Linux drivers are much better.

So, these computers have AGP slots? Why not go with an AGP Nvidia card?

OcCam

Discussion Starter · #8 · Mar 3, 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by Redmist

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Generally Nvidia's Linux drivers are much better.

So, these computers have AGP slots? Why not go with an AGP Nvidia card?

Nvidia doesnt have any agp cards that can fold.... and a NEW AGP card lacks any utility other than in an OLD AGP system.

Both of the cards that I have for the rig are AGP.

If I were to get a new card for this rig It would be a PCI card, since they come in handy when you have a bad flash ( or so Ive heard....), and if the folding goes well, I have 4 more slots to expand to.

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chemicalfan

· #9 · Mar 3, 2009

Interesting idea - 5 PCI slots could equal 5 folding GPUs! I hate to think about the heat production in that case though (not to mention the size of the PSU!!). Just checking - these are PCI graphics cards, not PCI-E cards, right?

On the drivers front: If you go with an older card, it should have drivers, I wouldn't worry too much about that. The older the device, the more likely it is to have drivers available

murderbymodem

· #10 · Mar 3, 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by OcCam

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Nvidia doesnt have any agp cards that can fold.... and a NEW AGP card lacks any utility other than in an OLD AGP system.

Both of the cards that I have for the rig are AGP.

If I were to get a new card for this rig It would be a PCI card, since they come in handy when you have a bad flash ( or so Ive heard....), and if the folding goes well, I have 4 more slots to expand to.

Why do you want a videocard for folding?

GPU2 folding doesn't work in Linux. It was possible to do it in Wine, but now the newer cores haven't been playing as nice.

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Melcar

· #11 · Mar 3, 2009

You could easily run GNOME on that thing. Plenty of RAM for it. I doubt you would be able to use the ATI card for folding; not sure about the nvidia one. The nvida card would most likely end up being the best choice simply because it's faster on a hardware level (the ATI open source drivers aren't known for their speed).
For Distros Ubuntu would work. If space/resources is a concern, PuppyLinux is your answer.

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chemicalfan

· #12 · Mar 3, 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by Redmist

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Why do you want a videocard for folding?

GPU2 folding doesn't work in Linux. It was possible to do it in Wine, but now the newer cores haven't been playing as nice.

Seriously??
Is it a driver issue, or a client issue?

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murderbymodem

· #13 · Mar 3, 2009

http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=8630
Issue with the Wine wrapper.

Edit: Oh, wait, they did come out with a new wrapper.
http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=6793
My bad, I forgot to check to see if they had it fixed before I posted :doh

OcCam

Discussion Starter · #14 · Mar 3, 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by Redmist

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Why do you want a videocard for folding?

GPU2 folding doesn't work in Linux. It was possible to do it in Wine, but now the newer cores haven't been playing as nice.

Actually it seems to be possible:

http://www.overclock.net/overclock-n...ing-linux.html

but yes the PPD from a gpu (or multiple gpu's) is probably better than what I would get with a single uniprocessor client. Im not saying its gonna happen but its something to think about.

for the time being Im going to use the geforce 4200Ti I think. Dont know if it'll run compiz-fusion but its the best I got for now.

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h00chi3

· #15 · Mar 3, 2009

Well you need a 8 series or greater card to fold on, and your CPU will only run the legacy console client and not the SMP.

OcCam

Discussion Starter · #16 · Mar 3, 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by h00chi3

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Well you need a 8 series or greater card to fold on, and your CPU will only run the legacy console client and not the SMP.

Oh I know that, I will just run the uniprocessor client for the time being and if I see a good deal on a PCI 8x00 or 9x00 card ill get one later

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thiussat

· #17 · Mar 4, 2009

The main thing to look at with regard to old computers is what desktop environment to run. The distro doesn't matter all that much. You could probably run KDE or Gnome just fine (maybe leave off compiz-fusion).

So, I suggest you download 3 or 4 distros and experiment with each. Download one with Xfce, one with KDE and one with Gnome. See which runs the best.

For Gnome, try Ubuntu
For KDE, try Fedora 10 (KDE edition -- you have to specify KDE when you download)
For XFCE, try Xubuntu

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General

· #18 · Mar 4, 2009

A dinosaur belongs in a dinosaur pin, so any computer that can be out of one is not a dinosaur

chemicalfan

· #19 · Mar 4, 2009

Does [email protected] not have a native Linux client then?

murderbymodem

· #20 · Mar 4, 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by chemicalfan

View Post

Does [email protected] not have a native Linux client then?

There is a native CPU client (Uni or SMP depending on your processor), however there is no native GPU client. You have to use Wine for that.

Though the SMP client in Linux is much better than the Windows SMP client. That's why you see so many people running VMware.

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