A friend of mine was just given an old laptop. It has Windows '98, a Pentium II processor, a 6GB hdd, and 64MB of RAM. He has been curious about linux operating systems, but never tried one. I told him I could install a modern operating system on this laptop, and that it it that would be pretty easy to use and would run better than Win 98. He wants to give it a shot.

My question then is, what is the best order of steps to do this? Do I need to create a swap partition first? If so, would GParted work? After doing this, would the live cd boot up and the rest be self-explainatory? Is there anything else I need to know or be aware of? I want this to go as smoothly as possible so as to not discourage a potential new linux user... __{{emoticon}}__

Thanks in advance.

Hi VCSkier
The antiX livecd will boot without any changes to the harddrive but you may need to change the boot order in bios to tell it to boot from the cd. However, with only 64MB of RAM it will be pretty slow. Once installed, antiX will run faster than from the livecd and be workable but will not give you a fair evaluation of the os. While it will run with 64MB it runs very well on 128MB. Any chance of a memory upgrade?

Minimum requirements for antiX-M7 series
1.3GB free space on the hard disk
64MB RAM plus swap
Pentium II CPU (Does not boot with AMD K5/K6)
[edit]
Preferred configuration
2GB free space on the hard disk
128MB RAM

You can use the livecd to partition your harddrive without destroying your Windows98 install as it has its own version of Gparted. Just follow the prompts once you choose to install from the livecd. You will want to create a root, swap, and home directory on your linux partition. If you need help once you get started post back here or on the Mepislovers.com forum under Antix.

Welcome to antiX and good luck to you!

Thanks for the info moron.

Will the antiX (MEPIS) installer setup GRUB to dual-boot with Windows 98? Will it detect and input the proper chain-loader entry in the menu.lst?

VCSkier wrote:A friend of mine was just given an old laptop. It has Windows '98, a Pentium II processor, a 6GB hdd, and 64MB of RAM. He has been curious about linux operating systems, but never tried one. I told him I could install a modern operating system on this laptop, and that it it that would be pretty easy to use and would run better than Win 98.

If by"better" you mean more secure and stable, then yes. But if by"better" you also mean faster, then no. I think you will be disappointed with the performance of GNU/Linux on that laptop unless you upgrade it by adding more RAM. A bigger, faster HDD would also help.

I would increase the RAM to 256 MB. If you don't want to do that, or it's not possible, then I recommend that you install Puppy Linux on it. It'll still be slow, but the performance should be tolerable.

Phil