Installing Ubuntu

[Chris Mohler]

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 6:29 PM, Chris Mohler <cr33dog at gmail.com> wrote:

> (my wifi adapter - running dd-wrt - came from a Goodwill dumpster).

s/adapter/router/ - sorry ;)

And since this is drifting towards an off-topic class war I'll provide
an anecdote about one of the more (personally) satisfying aspects of
using *nix.  About a year ago, I sold a friend of mine a (roughly) p4
system (also from the trash) and I could only outfit it with ½ GB of
RAM at the time - and it surprisingly did OK with Ubuntu 8.04.  Not
very speedy, but enough to get his schoolwork done and watch football
(aka soccer in the US) - and he got it for only the cost of me setting
it up.  TANSTAAFL, but it was a *cheap* lunch.

So again (to the OP): if you can get some cheap or free RAM, things
will be better for you.  If not, you might want to explore more
lightweight distros or WMs.   Until recently, I had an ancient Toshiba
laptop with 20 (count them!) megs of RAM and it could run Opera (using
BasicLinux), although it was usually faster/better to use lynx or
elinks.  With your hardware, I would use a full distro (like Ubuntu),
but with a lightweight WM like XFCE or fluxbox.

"Too Poor" Chris