Hey forum, I got the weird idea of installing Linux onto my old computer January because im gonna be building a new computer a month or so before that. But I think I may have found a flaw in my plan. My old compute'rs hardware specs are motherboard: p5kpl-cm. CPU: Intel core 2 duo e7400 2.8ghz, 4gb of DDR2 ram, and a 400gb HDD. I also have a Sapphire hd4830 512mb GDDR3 graphics card (try not to lol too much at it). I want Linux on this old computer because I wanna see how linux is, first hand, because I'm very curious. The problem is, I don't think my hardware will support linux. I was reading earlier that big companies usually don't make drivers for linux because not many people use or, or some reason like that. Even if I could get linux working on the computer, how much of a difference would drivers make in performance? Pre-thanks to everyone who helps me :) sorry if this isn't the right forum topic to post in.
Um , I use Ubuntu and lots of ppl use linux ; that article sounds bias in my opinion. Anyway you can get the drivers for both NVIDIA and AMD ( I still call them ATI Radeon) gpus. So, there aren't any driver issues from what I've seen , plus Ubuntu as a gaming platform is going . FYI , if you plan to install Steam find instructions , it's not the install it's the packages . BEsides that no problems with linux
Is linux possible to install on an old 2005 hp with an amd cpu? I heard linux is lightweight, is that true.
P.S: This computer has xp on it.
You can use an installer like wubi to try linux without doing anything to your windows installation. If you like it, you can install it properly later or if you don't, just remove the thing.
I have installed linux on many different types of hardware, Including old intel and amd chips, single core wuss machines with 64 meg of ram... and it ran fine. The hardware you discribe would run any distro I can think of, i.e. core 2 duo and 4 gigs of ram, My server runs the same hardware smoothly and it gets a bigger amount of a beating because I run a public game server on it...Yes I let steam use my hardware...The LiveCD List is where I get all my distros , put them on a key and one can easily check the distro our without installing it
Can i get a whole new hdd put it in the hp and install linux to that on the hp?
I personaly can't stand Ubuntu, I hate unity and I find every time I Give it another chance it gets more buggy. On older systems I tend to use Debian for it's Dependablity.
wubi and simillar installers put linux installation inside one file on an existing partition. You don't need to do anything about your existing hard drive and partition configuration.
If I were to run linux my old computer, would I notice any performance difference, in games primarily? And would I have to format my current HDD that has windows vista on it, to be able to Download linux?