[SWLUG] mass marketing Linux?

[Lyn David Thomas]

On Mon, 13 Feb 2006 20:39:41 +0000
Gerald Davies <gerald.davies at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2/13/06, Glasiad <glasiad at linuxquestions.net> wrote:
> >
> >  But what distro?
> >
> 
> how long is a piece of string.
> 
> if it's KDE then i'd go for Kubuntu (? i've not used it) or Mandriva
> (? Mandrakes new-ish name.  not sure it still comes with KDE) for
> noobs.  On old hardware i'm not sure you'd want to be running KDE
> though, i wouldn't ;) not even on newer hardware.
> 
> like i said, i'm sure everyone has an opinion.  everyone's an expert.
> 
> 2p

Indeed.  I have some experience with older machines and Linux.  

I would say to run KDE I'd not bother on machines with less than 128MB
Ram, and for older machines decent amounts of ram is a problem.

Again I'd go for Vector Linux 5.1 standard edition and additionally
install OpenOffice.

VL 5.1 recommends the following:

Processor 200MHz
RAM 64MB
Hard Drive 1.2GB + Swap

It comes with three window managers (some of which for simplicity you
may want to remove/not install)
Abiword, Xmms, Mplayer, Gimp, Sylpheed Claws, Firefox, Cups, Gaim etc.

If you want more then try 5.11 Soho, would suggest that 400MHz be the
minimum you would need and about 2.5GB hard drive.  Will work fine with
128MB RAM and includes KDE, though I'd not use that I'd install IceWM
(and uninstal Xfce) and set it to boot into IceWM as the standard
window manager.

As suggested using a ghost program you can produce an image of the hard
drive and set up.  If the machines copied to are all the same this
should be no problem.  The problem occurs if the hardware is widely
different.

One further thing, with the spec of the machines you won't get good 3d
performance from the graphics cards, my experience of promoting low
spec machines to the public (mainly Windows but I think this writes
through to Linux) is that they want to brows the web, word process and
play games.  Its the last point that is the problem, most of those old
machines will have very low spec graphics cards, often on board.  You
are only going to play the simplest games on these, none that require
any acceleration.  And you will need to supply some games with these
machines (or at least include some documentation for how to get them).


-- 
Lyn David Thomas