Linux on a p3 Comuter

Question

I have an aopen p3 computer that is ten years old, I've tried installing Ubuntu 10.4 several times and it won't take.

I've burned the cd's, bought a commercial version, tried to use wubi that won't work either, I bought a blank hard drive installed it and tried to load Ubuntu, no dice.

I did some work on two of my brother's computers and out of curiosity I slipped in the Ubuntu disc and they worked like a charm.

There are three things I could do 1. Buy a new computer. 2. Upgrade my mother board to a p4, or find an older version to use. So, my question is which version should I try? Thanks.

Answer 1

Option 4 -- try a different distro (unless you're tied to Ubuntu for some reason).

We just got wattOS running on my daughter's 10 year old Compaq Presario. It runs well, includes Abiword word processor and Gnumeric spreadsheet, and was pretty trouble free to test and install.

Answer 2

You could try Xubuntu if its a resource issue, or any of many other lite-linux distros. But when you say "no dice", what exactly is not working? Crashes on startup? No install?

Answer 3

I know this sounds obvious, but make sure you're using the i386 version and not the AMD-64 version. Other than that it should work. If that's not the problem, try getting your iso from a different download source. I found that some download resources work better than others. And of course make sure the ISO has the correct MD5 before burning it. Ubuntu 10.4 is quite good and it's worth investing some effort to get it going.