which distro for an oldish comp

onzlo

hi
i managed to get my paws on an oldish dell optiplex gx200 with p3 @794mhz and 256 mb ram and a 12 gig hd. it has xp pro with sp2 and i was wondering with distro would be good for an old comp and preferably a graphical installer like ubuntu or linux mint
any help is appreciated thanks

Orion

DSL and Puppy are aimed at low spec PCs. But you can always try a live CD of any of the major distros and see how well it works. I'd avoid Gnome or KDE variants on that box but maybe Xubuntu or Fluxbuntu might work ok.

Dartz

http://www.xubuntu.org

I have 8.04 version running happily on a Pentium 3, 600Mhz and 192Mb of RAM. You might want to expand your HDD a little bit, mind, but it should be alright.

Good, stable, almost idiotproof, and better at using the hardware than Windows XP/2000

Naikon

http://www.tinycorelinux.com/

Only 10 megs in size:pac:

onzlo

thanks but when i put in the live cd i made off my laptop and boot the old comp nothing changes it just loads into xp pro (default)
should i format the hd? (i don't really care about xp because i got it second hand any the school that had it has it so that i can change nothing and i got no recovery discs either)

Khannie

You'll need to change the boot order in the bios. When the computer says "press F2 to enter setup" or whatever, do that. There's a boot priority in there somewhere, put the CDROM in front of the HDD and try to boot into the livecd.

onzlo

thanks but there is a password there grrrrrr

Orion

onzlo wrote: »

thanks but there is a password there grrrrrr

Instructions to reset the system password

djmarkus

Crunchbang. I prefer 8.10 though

onzlo

thanks i looked for that every where

Orion

no probs - I worked for Dell when the Optiplex 200 was the latest and greatest - got used to searching their site then

onzlo

thanks again
I have done as the instructions said to remove the password and it worked, i also changed the boot sequence to allow it to boot from the cd drive but annoyingly it still doesn't boot the live cd i think the hardware might be broken or something (this doesn't surprise me because it is nearly 10 years old anyway)

Kinetic^

djmarkus wrote: »

Crunchbang. I prefer 8.10 though

Just put Crunchbang Lite 9.04 on a Celeron D with 256mb ram and it's fine for browsing. Way faster then XP that was on it.