Anyway, that's what I did last night. I'm gonna give Linux a try, can't be any worse that Win 98SE.
So I had an old PIII machine that was just creaky and cranky running 98SE. After years of this patch and that patch, drivers up the wazoo for some needed addons (usb 2.0, CD burner, new network card) the old girl was mostly a relic / paperweight / dust collector / piece of clutter in the spare bedroom we are going to paint next week. So I figure it's about time to demo the machine and then figure that, hooked up to a decent size (250MB) external USB drive it may be a good torrent machine. I'm gonna need to get a usb wireless g adapter, cause it's goin' downstairs. Hey, but it's Win98SE, I'm gonna have to mess around with drivers and CDs and new software apps that won't run right the first time anyway.
And it's pretty balky after almost 10 years at anything except having to crtl^alt^del and restart cause the system is frozen. So that may mean as well as cleaning it up from 10 years of crud being installed (that Erin) it probably needs to have the OS reinstalled. Unfortuanly that means reistalling drivers for network card, CD burner, USB card, not to mention the wireless g adapter. This ain't sounding like fun, especially cause I don't know where some of the CDs are, and we're painting next week.
OK, back to the scrap heap.
But wait, how bout Ubuntu?? Well let's see, I can do this. I'm pretty good with these things. So I check out he website and my girl doesn't meet the recommended requirements. Hell she barely meets the minumum requirements, and I know minimum ususlaly means unusable. So I read a little more and see Xubuntu, for older, less capable systems, and hey meets everything no problem. Great, download the file, burn a Live CD and Viola, install disk. And I can run it side by side too, incase it don't work so good ya know. My biggest fear is that I can't get drivers for all my anciant hardware and I need to go back to windows.
Well I boot the baby up and, woa, right the install screen. Go to install and at step 3 it asks if I want to install side by side with Win98 or by itself. Choose side by side to be safe and, Uh-Oh, not enough disk space. The machine only has 15 gigs total and 2 of that is in a Win98 partition. OK, what to do, oh hell, go for it. Choose Xubuntu only install and full speed ahead.
So, not to bad, only took about 45min, and the machine is ready to reboot. Ok, cross our fingers, Reboot!
My old machine booted, started in Xubuntu and ran fine in the 5 minute test I gave it. I was amazed!! All the addons worked, DVD and CD drives, network card, USB card. I really couldn't believe it. Nice work Ubuntu!!!!!
We'll get the usb wireless adapter today and see if that works. That's the final test, running it off a network cable in the basement is gonna be a challange, so here's to wireless.
Update 2008 08 07 1:30pm
Found some online documentation, looks like it's hit or miss with compatibility. There is a "wrapper" utility to get unsupported devices working with PC drivers, but I may pursue a longer network cord first.
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