Minimum spec for running Linux

I have commandeered my girl friend’s old laptop and I am looking to re-install it with a single image of Fedora 18. The laptop is currently running Windows XP SP2 and is pretty slow. Would I see improved performance with a Linux installation or am I just wasting my time?

I am just looking to practice basic X Windows operations, terminal and vi commands.
The spec is an AMD Anthon 522 MHz processor with 224 Mb RAM and a 25 GB HDD

I am also in the process of rebuilding another laptop with Windows 7 (Professional or Ultimate) which is currently running Vista Home Premium. I have the option to just upgrade to Ultimate or install Professional from scratch. Having a dual boot machine would make sense but I am unsure how space I would need for both partitions, and I may not be using Linux in the future (I am only doing a few weeks of studying it whilst I am at college this year); although I do have the options to study towards Linux+ and RHCSA if I wish later in the year.

The spec for this laptop is a Pentium Dual-Core 2GHz with 4GB RAM and 230GB HDD

That is a large HDD but I various other MS things to install for my studies.

Sorry for coming onto a Linux forum and keep mentioning the dark side.

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ChooseLife

BackToSchool wrote: »

AMD Anthon 522 MHz processor with 224 Mb RAM and a 25 GB HDD

I had a similarly spec'ed laptop some time ago (circa 2007) and I tried a bunch of different Linux distros on it. Distros that target older hardware - DSL (Damn Small Linux) and Puppy Linux worked very well, and so did BackTrack (v1 or v2 at the time). In fact, the responsiveness from Puppy Linux was far far greater than that of any pumped up server or a gaming machine I ever laid my hands upon (and I've seen quite a few) - it almost felt like apps were opening *before* I clicked on 'em...

At the same time, graphical versions of Ubuntu, SuSE, Fedora (their latest releases as of 2007) were terribly slow to the point of being unusable...

YMMV, but that's my experience

petedude

If you're going to run Linux with a GUI, you'll want at least 512MB of RAM.

I've found that simple server text-only VMs can run in as little as 384MB, depending on which services you're running.

Plain, straight command-line Linux to goof off with, maybe some light programming? 128MB might even do.

BackToSchool

Thanks guys, that is some useful info.

ChooseLife

petedude wrote: »

If you're going to run Linux with a GUI, you'll want at least 512MB of RAM.

See my comment above. Your statement is true for the bloated Gnome and KDE, but xfce, icewm, lxde, and other lightweight desktops will run happily on 128Mb RAM.

petedude wrote: »

I've found that simple server text-only VMs can run in as little as 384MB, depending on which services you're running.

Had Slack 10 running an FTP server with a complete OS footprint of 80Mb...

marco71

BackToSchool wrote: »

I am just looking to practice basic X Windows operations, terminal and vi commands.
The spec is an AMD Anthon 522 MHz processor with 224 Mb RAM and a 25 GB HDD

For what you want, hardware specs. are fine, as long as you'll use a light DM/WM, as mentioned already (lxde, openbox, blackbox, fluxbox, icewm, xfce4); I would stay away of flash, java and any video playback apps. (seems you have 32MB share for video from RAM, from a total of 256MB), but audio playback in X (or cli) is fine with some light apps. (audacious, bmp), together with other light tasks (just follow the link from my signature and you'll see I had worse hw specs. than you).
For a good response/speed, I recommend any non-kde, slackware based distro (salix, zenwalk, vector, porteus ... even slackware v.14 without kde), because your hw. specs. are too low for running a recent version of fedora, opensuse, ubuntu, mint, mageia or any other famous newbie distro ...
Some distros with graphical installer will not work (need 512MB RAM or more) and you should choose only some with text-install option; related to RHCSA study, your specs. are near the limit for a minimal, text installation (without X) ... you could try install a CentOS on a separate partition (forget about any distro virtualization, if you have no experience with some linux paravirtualization techniques like openvz).

For 2nd. machine, more powerfull, you can install any linux distro in a VM (virtual machine), using any virtualization solution in windows for running linux (vmware player/workstation/server, virtualbox)

marco71

petedude wrote: »

I've found that simple server text-only VMs can run in as little as 384MB, depending on which services you're running.

This is a physical machine (small office router) using 60MB RAM and running NAT (masquerade), DNS (caching), SMTP, squid:
root@mac:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 5
model : 2
model name : Pentium 75 - 200
stepping : 12
cpu MHz : 132.651

root@mac:~# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 61704 60004 1700 0 25332 8108
-/+ buffers/cache: 26564 35140
Swap: 237848 0 237848

And a virtual machine running three different http-servers in 90MB RAM:
slak112:~# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 512684 91176 421508 0 0 0
-/+ buffers/cache: 91176 421508
Swap: 262144 0 262144

slak112:~# netstat -tlnp
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State PID/Program name
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:37 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 155/inetd
tcp 0 0 192.168.122.112:8008 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 279/python
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:7080 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 272/litespeed (lsht
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:111 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 143/rpc.portmap
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:8080 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 252/nginx.conf
tcp 0 0 192.168.122.112:80 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 241/lighttpd
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:752 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 146/rpc.statd
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:113 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 155/inetd
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:4949 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 302/munin-node
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:22 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 158/sshd
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:8088 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 272/litespeed (lsht
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:25 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 236/master
tcp 0 0 192.168.122.112:443 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 241/lighttpd

haziz

Install a lightweight distro and boot into the command line and do most of your work in the command line. The old laptop should be fine. If you wish to boot into a graphical interface then use a lightweight WM (e.g. XFCE or LXDE). I am particularly fond of Slackware which still treats the command line as a first class citizen and does offer XFCE as one of it's WM default options (the other is KDE which would tax this machine).

wes allen

A friend gave me a g4 powerbook, and I am pondering installing one of the PPC linux builds on it for fun. Or maybe turn it into a dedicated wireshark machine, just have to see if there are still binaries out there, or learn how to do the compile thing.

haziz

wes allen wrote: »

A friend gave me a g4 powerbook, and I am pondering installing one of the PPC linux builds on it for fun. Or maybe turn it into a dedicated wireshark machine, just have to see if there are still binaries out there, or learn how to do the compile thing.

Try MintPPC (the project seems frozen at the moment) or the PPC version of Lubuntu or Debian. I am happily running MintPPC v9 on mine. It feels very responsive working purely from the command line but is sluggish when I start LXDE.