I wanna put Linux on this box

jackiebaron

I have a laptop.....Compaq, shopbought thing that has now been handed down from herself because (various reasons). Anyway, I want to stick a nice stable Linux distro on it with as many bells and whistles as I can find. The CPU is a core 2 duo celeron thing. The only Linux I've been able to load is Ubuntu....and I hate it

Is there any RH, Deb, Mandriva, Suse or anything other than Ubuntu that could go on this thing?

Thanks

jb

Khannie

Anything at all should work on it. What did you hate about ubuntu? Most other distros aren't significantly different. (/awaits abuse)

Johnboy1951

jackiebaron wrote: »

I have a laptop.....Compaq, shopbought thing that has now been handed down from herself because (various reasons). Anyway, I want to stick a nice stable Linux distro on it with as many bells and whistles as I can find. The CPU is a core 2 duo celeron thing. The only Linux I've been able to load is Ubuntu....and I hate it

Is there any RH, Deb, Mandriva, Suse or anything other than Ubuntu that could go on this thing?

Thanks

jb

My personal favourite

www.pclinuxos.com

Lots of different desktop types available .... quick downloads from Heanet

http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/pclinuxos/live-cd/

Try a few live to see which DE suits your needs.

Stuxnet

if your looking for a working out of the box experience try Linux Mint, or PinguyOS has lots of added frills, both are Ubuntu based, both heavily tweaked, and include drivers, and codecs etc, Im assuming you want an easy life, (yes new ubuntu is cack...mint ftw :-) )

PrzemoF

jackiebaron wrote: »

[..]The only Linux I've been able to load is Ubuntu....and I hate it
[..]
jb

Do you hate look, feel or something else? Do you want windows/apple interface with bells & whistles?

I'd start with gnome-look.org and find something that you like.

I hope that you're not "I hate it because I cannot handle it because it's different that what I know".

Try to define what you want - we'll help you.

jackiebaron

Khannie wrote: »

Anything at all should work on it. What did you hate about ubuntu? Most other distros aren't significantly different. (/awaits abuse)

I try loading RH9 on it, Debian, Mandriva, Suse and one or 2 others .... all crashed during the installation. I'm certain it's the CPU.

Stuxnet

red hat 9 end of life was 2004 & hasnt been supported since 2006 ! why would you be trying to install that ? no wonder nothing works ??

Im not sure what your level of linux knowledge is, ...i'm making some conclusions going by your question in the op, and the tyoe of distros youve tried to install....

have a look at Mint Debian edition for a good working distro,

jackiebaron

iPwnage wrote: »

red hat 9 end of life was 2004 & hasnt been supported since 2006 ! why would you be trying to install that ? no wonder nothing works ??

Im not sure what your level of linux knowledge is, ...i'm making some conclusions going by your question in the op, and the tyoe of distros youve tried to install....

have a look at Mint Debian edition for a good working distro,

Yeah, I know it's as old as dirt but I have it on CD. My Linux tinkering days go back to 1995 when you used to have to crack open the PC and take out the hard drive and find out how many cylinders and sectors and sh!t were on it in order to load Slackware. Since then it's become much easier but I've not kept up. And now it seems there's a million Linuxes to be had and I just want a nice RedHat style one that I can load on this laptop so that I can then start downloading games and music and other fun an be able to log on to this laptop from my other laptop and mess around.

I'm a HPUX bod myself. I know I mentioned Ubuntu is on it and I don't like it. Well I just find Ubuntu weird. I mean, why the hell when building a UX system do you not have a root account. It's bizarre.

Oh and I tried Mint....crashed also.

jackiebaron

PrzemoF wrote: »

Do you hate look, feel or something else? Do you want windows/apple interface with bells & whistles?

I'd start with gnome-look.org and find something that you like.

I hope that you're not "I hate it because I cannot handle it because it's different that what I know".

Try to define what you want - we'll help you.

I guess I'm like what iPwnage mentioned. I want an easy life and have a distro that can download and install stuff fairly easy without too much hassle. Like I said, it's a decent enough little laptop but it's got this celeron 2 duo chip and when I was loading Mandriva it mentioned that it "overheated" and then shutdown. Installing other linuxes just crashed. Ubuntu was the only one that loaded successfully so I think it's the CPU but maybe I'm wrong. I will try the pinGUY thingy also.

Johnboy1951

jackiebaron wrote: »

I guess I'm like what iPwnage mentioned. I want an easy life and have a distro that can download and install stuff fairly easy without too much hassle. Like I said, it's a decent enough little laptop but it's got this celeron 2 duo chip and when I was loading Mandriva it mentioned that it "overheated" and then shutdown. Installing other linuxes just crashed. Ubuntu was the only one that loaded successfully so I think it's the CPU but maybe I'm wrong. I will try the pinGUY thingy also.

If you are getting overheating problems then maybe you need to clean out the heatsink in the unit ...... generally they clog with dust-bunnies and depending on environment should be cleaned out about every 6 months.
Uncleaned the air flow is interrupted and does not cool the CPU properly.

How much RAM is in that PC?
Is some of it being used for the graphics?

Some modern, visually 'heavy' distros really need about 1GB of memory available to run well ..... such as KDE.
Others, like LXDE, will run much faster on less memory.

You need to select the distro/desktop environment to suit the hardware.
That was one of the reasons I gave the link above .... there are options for a full range of DEs from KDE down to Openbox.

Give this one a run to see if it suits the hardware .....

http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/pclinuxos/live-cd/pclinuxos-lxde-2011.09.iso

The desktop is light while the distro has all the multimedia stuff available.

regards

Stuxnet

my last recommendation so after your last bit of info, Fedora, Im not a fan of it myself, but there are actually a few worth while fedora based respins, Fuduntu rolling release with gnome 2.x or Fusion Linux, gnome 2 & 3 available

you'll feel at home, as fedora is the upstream project of RedHat

good luck

jackiebaron

iPwnage wrote: »

if your looking for a working out of the box experience try Linux Mint, or PinguyOS has lots of added frills, both are Ubuntu based, both heavily tweaked, and include drivers, and codecs etc, Im assuming you want an easy life, (yes new ubuntu is cack...mint ftw :-) )

iPwnage, is it possible that my crashing problems with mint and the Celeron 2 duo were as a result of me trying to load the 32bit instead of 64 on the laptop?

niallb

What version of Ubuntu are you hating at the moment?

If you're looking for a working experience, pick any wellknown distro, but make sure that the release is 2 years newer than your hardware.

That gives enough time that all drivers you need should exist, and if not, there'll be plenty of people complaining on the internet about the specific problems and coming up with workarounds!

Redhat familiarity does suggest trying Fedora, but perhaps you're more familiar with the old desktop than with the management tools.
The old version of XFCE is comfortably like CDE if you've HPUX experience!
The new panel I think is a bit dumbed down but it might fit in with what you're used to.

It would help a lot if you mentioned what model of Compaq you're using. There might be a particular problem.

Capt'n Midnight

niallb wrote: »

It would help a lot if you mentioned what model of Compaq you're using. There might be a particular problem.

+1

If you have less than 256MB RAM then go for puppylinux

Ubuntu 10.4.3 LTS is long term support a good compromise in terms of hardware support for most machines if you just want to use the OS.

In newer versions of ubuntu the user interface has jumped the shark and you won't learn much using them, might be OK if you are using a touchscreen.