Ubuntu

Problem Bootimg on Older Computer

Asked by Shane Hogan

I tried installing 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on an HP Pavilion 67456, formerly running Windows ME. It has a 700 Mhz processor, and 64 MB of SDRAM. THe live CD couldn't be used on the computer because of the low amount of memory so I hooked up the drive to another computer and installed the OS. Everything worked fine so I hooked the drive back up to the first computer. It makes it to the login screen, I login and the background stays up but nothing loads. What's going on, could it be from switching the drive between different computers?

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Answered
For:
Ubuntu Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
Micah Gersten (micahg) said : 		#1

Per this doc:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements

Try the alternate install CD. Different machines have different hardware and require different drivers.

Revision history for this message
Tom (tom6) said : 		#2

Ubuntu itself is really aimed at more top-end machines to compete with other fully featured OS's such as Windows7 and Xp. However you could try Xubuntu which is designed to be much lighter-on-system-resources and has lighter versions of some of the heavier apps, such as Gnome Office rather than OpenOffice. It still has a lot of the fancy desktop effects and then main noticable difference is simply that it's blue rather than earthy
http://www.xubuntu.org/get
it uses the same repositories as Ubuntu so you can quickly bloat it up.

However i think that the 64Mb ram is probably holding your machine back quite seriously. I'm not sure how much it costs for laptop ram but it might be worth testing exactly what speed ram you need before buying any. Generally it's worth buying larger ram because the price difference between a 500Mb pair of sticks and 128Mb sticks and the performance difference is fairly huge.

64Mb in a laptop is usually better than 64Mb in a normal machine because of the architecture so there are a few more other linux distros that i could recommend trying and lots more worth exploring too. Try these as LiveCds before installing, it'll be a bit slower but will let you have a demo of them ;)

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=wolvix
Try Hunter first as it has OpenOffice and some odd games :) but Cub is lighter.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=tinycore
New and quite revolutionary, the repos are getting better fast, see the reviews

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=slitaz
This one will try to load into ram but there's a boot parameter to keep it on Cd

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=vectorlight
(by reputation only, my hardware happened to not like it & i didn't even visit the forums to get fixes)

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=antix
Mepis do antiX but you have to hunt around a bit to find it though. It looks quite nice and uses a right-click menu on the desktop instead of "Start" button menu

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=puppy
often these puplets claim to have firefox but actually it's a much lighter version called BonEcho which i don't like quite so much, seems to be just me though

Hopefully there should be something there but you'll notice that the page layouts at distrowatch allow for good comparisons between distros so it might be worth going to their front page to find the top 100, most visited distro pages

Good luck and happy hunting
Regards from
Tom :)

Revision history for this message
Tom (tom6) said : 		#3

lol, i meant the price difference is relatively low but the performance difference is huge lol

Can you help with this problem?

Provide an answer of your own, or ask Shane Hogan for more information if necessary.

To post a message you must log in.