Soumyadip Modak wrote:
On Mon, 2005-01-03 at 20:55 +0530, Prem wrote:The question was also about the price. If you want to reduce the risk of hardware problems, the best would be to go for a low-end P4 (DDR) with a 1.6-2.0Ghz celeron. CRT monitors have long lives. New P3s cost about the same as low-end P4s(400FSB...).
I would like to know the lowest configuration of PC you have
successfully used to run Linux as a barebones desktop.
I've personally used a Celeron 400 Mhz machine with 128 MB RAM, i440LX mobo and Cirrus Logic 5446 1MB VRAM graphics card to get a pretty usable desktop that can run GNOME 2.6. :) Of course since the hard disk has started to fail, I've had to retire this machine from Desktop duty :(
I would like to
build a cheap one for my dad with which he can browse the net, watch
VCDs & use the TV Tuner card to watch TV shows. He would be using a
USB based ADSL modem.
You can get a very usable desktop out of a P3 ~700 Mhz, 128 MB RAM (don't go below that, if you don't want to thrash the hard disk), an el-cheapo i810 based mobo. Question is, is the ADSL modem a USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 device ?? If it's the latter you'll have to check the specs of the mobo to see if USB 2.0 is supported. Oh, and check whether the hard disk is working properly.
For the above requirements, I considered using Damn Small Linux, but
it doesnt support the TV Tuner & the USB based ADSL modem. So any
suggestion of a suitable distro would also be helpful for me.
<shameless plug> Debian ?? :D </shameless plug> or Knoppix or Ubuntu.
The latter two specially has very good hardware support.
By the way, DSL IMHO doesn't have a GUI that a person coming from the
Windows world can easily adapt to.
HTH
Best,
A. Mani Member, Cal. Math. Soc.
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