One of the computers in our office was an old box running Windows XP. When I say old, I mean that it actually pre-dates my employment by a couple years which puts it at about seven years old. It is a Compaq Evo D series that had a 40 Gb hard drive, two 250 MB sticks of DDR ram, integrated sound and video on the motherboard as well as a 10/100 Ethernet slot. It also had a few USB ports. As you can tell, it isn't something you'd want to buy your kid as a graduation present. Anyway, after spending about a half hour just to modify a few files on the computer, I said no more, and we upgrade the computer with a nice refurb which broke down not long after...but that is another story.
So my thoughts were, what should I do with this crappy old box? e-Waste? Use it as a door stop? What? Then I remembered hearing that Linux is touted as an operating system that could run on old hardware. I've been hearing these claims for years and as such, decided to give Linux a try on it. As an aside, it never occurred to me that Linux distributions get upgraded just like any other software, and as such sometimes old hardware is just too old. That being said, other than DSL and Puppy Linux, I found that after trying a couple of installs, I had to upgrade the ram on this particular machine to 2 GB.
So when I decided to dive into Linux, I did what anyone out there might do when trying to learn about a new subject; I Googled it. I simply used a search term such as Top 10 Linux Distros, and started going through the first couple of pages in the search results.
As you might guess with an operating system as diverse as Linux, many people had wildly varying opinions about what the top 10 distros might be. With hundreds of versions of Linux out there, there is a lot for people to love and hate about each one. After a while however, I started seeing trends develop and found that a few distros were mentioned in virtually all the posts. Those were:
- Ubuntu
- Mint
- DSL
- Puppy
- Fedora
- Debian
- OpenSuse
- JoliCloud
I had heard of virtually all of them and was actually a bit surprised to hear people's enthusiasm for JoliCloud. I hadn't however heard of Mint, which is strange because it was either number one or number two on most lists. So over a period of a few days, I tried out a few of the distros. Out of the ones listed above, I decided to try:
- Ubuntu
- Mint
- DSL
- Puppy
The first was Ubuntu. While I understand that Ubuntu seems to be the anointed distribution as of late, I've got to say that I didn't care for it. The install went fine, but I just couldn't get into to the Unity interface. Call me old fashioned, but the windows buttons go on the right! This ain't England people! Although we do drive on the left here too, so that wasn't a great metaphor. I also found that even though I had upgrade the ram, it was still not much quicker than the original XP install.
After that, I tried the two small installs: DSL (Damn Small Linux) and Puppy. Out of these two, I kind of liked puppy, but didn't like the idea of running the entire box on removable media. Yes, I did find out how to install it on the hard drive, but I thought I might give Mint a try, as I already got a feel for it using the removable media.
After going to the Mint website, I found that there were three different versions available for a 32 bit machine: LXDE, KDE, and Mint 12 for Gnome 3. At the time, I had no idea what the difference was between any of these, and based on my experience with the slowness of Ubuntu, I decided to go with the one recommended for the older machines, which was the LXDE release. The install went off with out a hitch (by the way, I will will discuss install details in another post in a few days or so). And after the install finished and I had a day or so to mess around with it, I knew that I had found the Linux distribution for me!
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