Looking to use an old Dell Dimension 2400 as a torrent box. System has 1ghz process and 512mb of ram. Any suggestions of which flavor of Linux I should use?
Get a live cd or even a few and see what you prefer. A lot of people start with Ubuntu then graduate to something that gives more control. But ultimately, can do just about everything with just about any distro. Just a matter of how much effort it takes to get there, Ubuntu dumbs down a lot of things which ends up getting in the way once you know what you're doing.
Schmick is right. Get some live DVDs, and try them out. I started on Ubuntu 2 years ago on a Pentium 3 with 768 MB of RAM, and it ran fine, but once I became accustomed I moved to Debian and then Arch. I still run both Debian and Arch, but to newcomers, I always recommend Ubuntu or Mint. If you have some technical nouse, and don't mind doing a little digging for info, I feel Debian, Xubuntu or Lubuntu might be better for your spec. But like schmick said, download a few live CDs, or buy a magazine with a Live CD, and try a few out until you find one you like.
you could also look on some distros that are meant for dated pcs like puppy linux,sdl,lubuntu and slitaz-3.0. And if very optimistic try a freebsd like unix os, its based on at&t's os.
unix unless it's older will need a lot more bang than that.. freeBSD minimum specs for the latest is something like a gig of ram (it installs mysql and a couple of other real heavyweights) .. otherwise apart from sabayon and ubuntu(whatever flavour) anything will be fine.. and anyway.. would a n00b to anything different even get a desktop together with unix? .. very doubtful if they would even manage to partition the drive.
How about fedora ? I am currently running fedora 14 on my eee pc 900a. Use to have opensuse, but got tired of it constantly crapping out due to the drm in it. Plus I can now watch hulu on it using the hulu app.
puppy right now is a pig to install.. their forums are full of people having big troubles.. seems a main file installs with the wrong name.. Horses for courses.. I'm not that keen on fedora being an offshoot of a commercial version.. and rpm based things just annoy me.. just personal preference.. I like debian and slackware and their offspring (except ubuntu of any flavour.. nasty mono patented dependencies.. sudo (short for stupidity) and often broken..
Jan would disagree, but Arch FTW! Not for newbies though unless you're prepared for a steep learning curve.
never seen it work.. it's always broken or doesn't like my hardware.. and their repositories were a disaster.. timeout.. 404.. or file missing.. useless! stick to something more than 4 people use to get started..
Part of the deal with a rolling distro: old packages don't hang around and backports aren't maintained. So if a core package gets upgraded all the packages that depend upon it will also receive an update and the entire local catalogue is out of date. Just a case of routinely performing a pacman -Syu before installing anything new. Just a different way of doing things.
too much like openBSD for my liking is that.. takes forever and for anything above basics it's always breaking.. but as I said.. there isn't much help doing a pacman -Syu.. when the damn repositories are broken to start with.. and the stupid thing refuses to start the xserver with exactly the same configs as debian on the same box!!!! It's like gentoo.. hobbyists only IMHO.. people who like messing with broken setups more than actually using it for anything.
You probably weren't starting hal/dbus before trying to start x. Arch doesn't autostart daemons just because you installed them. I think that is a good thing.
I have to agree with that DarkEly said about trying #!. I am currently using a box with a 2.2Ghz processor and it stays at about 20% usage even with Nightly open with 20 tabs. It should work great as a torrent box.
