OT - Old PC - Free Operating System Ideas

[Richard]

Guess I must just be lucky.

[Another Dave]

Linux Mint definitely. I would go for the Cinnamon desktop. It's the default for Mint and the latest version of Mint (17.3) doesn't come with Mate pre-loaded. Mate was a stopgap for people who wanted to stay with Gnome 2 and the fact that it's no longer pre-loaded suggests its days are numbered. Cinnamon is based on Gnome 3 but doesn't look anything like it - thank goodness.

The Mint installer has the option to use the whole disk - that should do it.

Another Dave

[DerbyBorn]

Thanks all. I have started down the route of Ubuntu. It is still applying updates and I need to change the screen resolution somehow. Early days.

[Mr Pounder Esquire]

There is a lot of stuff on XP that you can get rid of and disable to speed it up. It's all on Google. I've done it, it's safe and it makes a difference. Perhaps worth trying? I've tried Linux on a low power machine and could not see any extra speed.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yes. Either the bios supports USB boot, or it doesn'yt. If it does and you are not scared to fiddle with it, USB boot 'just works'

If it does not, you are fscked

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, its not that much better than windows for general stuff. But it runs BETTER stuff.

Mind you it boots faster

This machine with SSD bots in under 20 seconds and thats including bios checks and a 10 second timeout to select the operating system.

>

[Huge]

Linux Mint. Ubuntu has a weird UI these days and requires ferkling to get a sane one. As a newbie, you don't want to be ferkling.

Download an image in Windows, burn a DVD, then boot it. Then follow the instructions.

The MATE desktop should be pretty familiar to an XP user.

[Huge]

Twaddle.

[jack]

Bullshit. I have an ancient celeron laptop running XP that does the web fine.

Quite slow to do a full restart, but otherwise fine.

[Richard]

Fuck off Rod

[Mr Pounder Esquire]

He did say that it would be used for web browsing, I took that as not being used for other stuff. Can't see what BETTER stuff its going to run very well with 1Gb RAM.

I've never done or needed to do a BIOS check in XP on boot up. I don't think its doing it on the sly.

[Bill]

In message , DerbyBorn writes

If it were me, I'd follow the suggestions here and either run Mint or keep XP. If it has any hardware in it that was in any way exotic (eg here it would be sound cards), there may never have been Linux drivers and now there never will be. If not, Mint doesn't horrify Windows users and it is a more modern OS. FWIW, in the last year I've sent two people on their way with low powered machines - one is Mint, one XP. They are either happy or avoiding me.

[Mr Pounder Esquire]

Keep XP and try what I suggested. Could be too late now :-( I wasted too many hours beating myself up with Mint. Then common sense kicked in, I asked myself "why" and Mint was kicked out.

[DerbyBorn]

I tried Ubuntu but could adjust the graphic size. Trying Mint now. Suspect I have some driver issues. Cinnamon is currently running without video hardware acceleration is a message on the screen.

[Another Dave]

Try Menu>Administration>Driver Manager

and select the recommended driver when it, eventually, gives you the choice.

Another Dave

[Mr Pounder Esquire]

Do what I suggested.

[Another Dave]

To change the height of the panel across the bottom Right click on an empty space on the panel and select Panel Settings. Change the panel height using the slider control. Mine's set to slightly over 2/3 across.

To change font size etc. Menu>Preferences>Fonts and change the scaling factor (I've set mine to 1.4) and change the font sizes (I've set all mine to 10). I've set hinting to medium.

Experiment to find what suits you.

It may not be relevant but Firefox and Thunderbird have an add-on called "Theme Font & Size Changer". It's worth a shot.

Another Dave

[Adrian Caspersz]

Once you get to Ubuntu, you'll find Unity horribly slow with that CPU and probably old graphics.

Suggest a change to Xubuntu or if you've already installed, try the following to switch.

From Unity to Xfce: Ubuntu 14.04 becomes Xubuntu 14.04

[DerbyBorn]

Huge wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Well I have learned a lot today. I have had Ubunto and Mint. Both gave me Resolution problems and the screen was virtually unusable. Trying Ubunto once more as I got it okay once and then decided it had too many utilities. I am thinking Google Chrome OS might be suitable.

[DerbyBorn]

I suspect I have messed with it too much over the years and I want to do a clean installlation of a new OS