Um.. Should I try Ubuntu on a machine that ISN'T A POS? :'(

Having to reformat pos emachines for the 8th time...

I'm wondering if I should try a better machine...

The machien I have in mind has ati card...

Would that matter?

 

What ATI card is it? Sometimes it can take a little bit of work to get an ATI card to even display in Linux. My laptops x700 almost always throws a fit in linux, and I either dont have a screen at all (Thats interesting to fix) or I get dropped to command line until I get competent video drivers (fglrx).

 

9600xt

 

The 9600 is fine in Ubuntu. You'll get video right away, but you'll have to setup the proper video drivers after install to make sure you get working 3D for beryl.

 

Could u please explain more....

Did u try...
1.DD command (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda)
2.manually try to partition?


Here u go for a ubuntu ATI Guide - http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=423584

Steve

 

Millions of issues.

The old pc has had a million issues.

1. hdd too small.
2. Cd-rom wouldn't read burnt cds.
3. bios wont let cd-rom sometimes start (bios update and new cd-rom fixed it)
4. geforce 4 won't display 3d.
5. Crashes if I do too much and I must reinstall (but it's only a Celery 500 mhz, 256 megs of ram and a geforce 4 pci)

It's really too old to be messing around with, should be flung in the trash I know it.

As it currently stands, I have the old pc barely alive, 'updated' enough to run linux with:

Celeron 500
256 megs sdram 133
geforce 4 420 pci
4 gig hdd hard drive (these are my old stuff, now what I upgraded it with)
17" black dell crt
kensington wireless laser mouse
30 gig hdd
compaq keyboard
x-230 speakers

Bleh

 

I've run Xubuntu on worse systems than that. (Read; PI 200MHz, 96MB ram)

 

Throw FreeBSD on there, you can still get some use out of it yet. I run an older FreeBSD with no KDE or Gnome, just command line and a small specific install, amazing what I can still use it for without all the bloat, Web Server, Firewall, and NFS server.

 

You could alternatively use something like Damn Small Linux (DSL). It comes with the Fluxbox window manager and ran like a pro on my 500MHz Celeron (which is matched with 128MB of RAM and an onboard VGA controller with like, 512k video memory). I ended up replacing it with Xubuntu, which runs okay, but it takes forever to load stuff up. I threw Fluxbox on there though, and it sped things up quite a bit. Fluxbox is a pretty lightweight window manager.

 

I have Dapper running on a PIII 550 Mhz with 192 Mb of RAM back at home. Its not super fast, but then again I only use that computer for basic things, such as light multitasking, instant messeging, email, internet browsing, etc. I'm sure your experience with Ubuntu will be better on a better machine.

 

I had/have Ubuntu Edgy running on a celeron 466 w/ 384MB of memory, it wasn't blazing by any means, but you could get by if you're patient.

I plan to scrap that install and set up something much lighter and server-oriented, though.