Installing Ubuntu on old hardware

[Joseph Sinclair]

Kenneth wrote:
>> They are both turn of the century technology (Year 2000) both AMD500
>> 1 has CD writer/floppy/100MB zip, replaceable 20gig hd's, and 256MB mem
>> the other has 128MB mem, CD, floppy, fix 14GB HD.
>>
>> Here are my questions:
>> 1) If a Debian derivative (which I like because of apt-get) does the
>> current real or imagined troubles at Debian _Really_ affect Ubuntu?
>> 2) With older hardware does anyone see a problem?
> 
> I haven't installed on a system with so little memory for a while, but
> assuming you use a text installer I don't think you should have a problem. 
> For your desktop machine, you may want to look into something more
> lightweight than KDE or Gnome, since memory is limited.
> 
I second the lightweight desktop recommendation, XUbuntu uses XFCE, and is said to have much lower system requirements for the GUI.
Since both systems are older and have some limitations, you might also want to consider installing Debian directly, since Debian can be install-time customized to limit what's chosen better than Ubuntu (at the cost of having to spend a lot more time picking and choosing components, and having less auto-detected hardware) to save disk space and runtime resources.

The conflicts at Debian are completely normal for them, I'd be surprised if some sort of internal controversy didn't crop up in Debian at least once each quarter (or once a week ;}).  It's all just more public this time around because some people decided to skip all the time usually wasted with theoretical arguments and set up an experiment to see if the idea would work IRL, and that forced the normal conflict into public view.

Old hardware is always difficult, and Ubuntu doesn't work as hard as the upstream Debian to maintain compatibility with old equipment, but it shouldn't be too bad, in some cases older equipment is actually easier to handle, since it's more likely that there's a GPL driver available.  That said, I have an old machine bought in 2000 (Celeron 700) that runs the XUbuntu LiveCD just fine (haven't tried to install, I don't have a real need for it right now and power's costly for that box).