I would consider early Pentium II as 'barely XPable', and that's not something I would install Ubuntu on.

If an XP-powered school PC is slow, chances are it's a Pentium IV at least (Dell Dimensions likely) and has some drive-by installed spyware sucking its resources, and 340 pixels of toolbar height latched on its IE6 at the minimum.

The PCs I used were old Dell C521s, and those have Athlon X2s, 1GB ram, and an onboard ATI X1300. I cleaned everything off the machines other than IE and Office 2003, and they still ran at a snail's pace.

Installing Ubermix 2 on them resulted in faster boot times, and improved system responsiveness. Remember, Ubermix isn't the full Ubuntu install. It's stripped down by design, to run on older machines typical of what schools in poorer districts have in bulk.

Hell, waaaay back in the day, I ended up building a custom linux image from the kernel up to run on P75s with only a 64MB CF card for storage (48 r/o for the OS, with the remaining 16MB for r/w) 16MB RAM and a WiFi Card in AP mode, and those systems were quite responsive. They were a test bed for getting the image to run on SBCs from Soekris. They were incredibly inexpensive versions of Bluesocket and Colubris WLAN controllers, back when those cost several thousand each.

*EDIT*

Besides, I got my first PC (IBM 8086 with DOS 3.1, two floppy drives, and EGA) when I was ten, and since nobody in my family knew how to use it, I had to figure it out all by myself. Thanks to that, I got very proficient with PCs, which is why I got into IT and network engineering in the first place. Hopefully, with all the tools that come with Ubermix, it might spark the same interest in the kids I've been giving the PCs to.

"IM THE EXPERT, I HAVE RETRO PC HISTORY!!! MOVE OVER"

Probably active virus scanning bogging it down then. Athlon X2s should be snappy for XP, and in the case of a school, that shouldn't even be 'old'!

leileilol wrote:

"IM THE EXPERT, I HAVE RETRO PC HISTORY!!! MOVE OVER"

Probably active virus scanning bogging it down then. Athlon X2s should be snappy for XP, and in the case of a school, that shouldn't even be 'old'!

Trust me, first thing I did was thoroughly scan the PCs before I even started uninstalling all the unnecessary crap. There was just no fixing the speed issues in XP on those machines, short of blasting the OS off, and installing a lighter weight OS. And none of the machines came with valid XP disks, so short of pirating it, I wasn't about to go out and buy a ton of licenses for it, out of the kindness of my heart.

If I still had a spare C521, I'd send it to you, so you could see what I was dealing with. 😜

Install linux on them, Fedora is nice when you have MATE installed. For gods sake don't use ubuntu. I have many old Pentium 4 computers that I can still use online and do light gaming with thanks to linux. Give Fedora 20 a try but download the full DVD so that you can easily choose from all the options when installing the OS.

King_Corduroy wrote:

Install linux on them, Fedora is nice when you have MATE installed. For gods sake don't use ubuntu. I have many old Pentium 4 computers that I can still use online and do light gaming with thanks to linux. Give Fedora 20 a try but download the full DVD so that you can easily choose from all the options when installing the OS.

Why not use the ubuntu variant? This is just for younger kids who'll use it for schoolwork and researching on the internet. They play games on their consoles. What I like about Ubermix was that it was created to run on older machines, and includes a ton of educational tools, as well as productivity (like Libre Office), art programs (blender, GIMP, etc...), and programming tools/tutorials right out of the gate.

I also like how the kids userspaces are completely separate from the OS space, so they can only bork up their userspace (5 minute fix to restore it using their thumbdrive.).

Is there a light weight, education oriented version of Fedora? A full linux distro isn't needed, or I would've installed Mint 17 cinnamon and been done with it.

BTW, the kids in question belong to a hyper-religious family, so OpenDNS Family Shield has already been put in place on their RG, and the father is looking for linux versions of NetNanny or something similar, so they won't be doing much online.

If the kids are nice, I *might* put linux versions of ScummVM and Dosbox, along with a bunch of older games on there. Unless the parents freak out, that is.

Because Ubuntu is terribly buggy and it monitors what you do. No I don't think there currently is a version of fedora geared towards children, it's mainly geared towards general desktop users. Besides how light weight are we talking here? What are you running it on? If you are running it on a dual core AMD X2 like you say above you don't really need to worry, Fedora with MATE or XFCE will run lightning quick.
Like I said I'm using fedora 20 with the MATE desktop on a Dell Inspiron 6000 Laptop 1.5gb ram and 1.8ghz 32bit Pentium 4 and it runs smooth as silk, I can even play some basic Linux games on it and use Scummvm. Which btw you should totally sneak in there, I hate that super religious parents do that. I mean what is a childhood if you can't play some video games now and then? Especially the classics like Monkey Island and stuff.

There's Slackware. You can do a custom bootstrap with distcc, but if you don't know scripting you'll have to learn it. Slackware is already 486 optimized BTW. I think it is the longest lasting Linux distro to support floppies too. Slackware is really cool because you don't need the internet to do stuff like bootstrapping (at least after you've downloaded everything you know you want), and support isn't scattered all over the place.

EDIT:
Nevermind. Maybe some here don't like Linux...

IMHO, Arch Linux is only way to go. No edu version, but you can build your own with Archiso. 😎

King_Corduroy wrote:

Because Ubuntu is terribly buggy and it monitors what you do. No I don't think there currently is a version of fedora geared towards children, it's mainly geared towards general desktop users. Besides how light weight are we talking here? What are you running it on? If you are running it on a dual core AMD X2 like you say above you don't really need to worry, Fedora with MATE or XFCE will run lightning quick.
Like I said I'm using fedora 20 with the MATE desktop on a Dell Inspiron 6000 Laptop 1.5gb ram and 1.8ghz 32bit Pentium 4 and it runs smooth as silk, I can even play some basic Linux games on it and use Scummvm. Which btw you should totally sneak in there, I hate that super religious parents do that. I mean what is a childhood if you can't play some video games now and then? Especially the classics like Monkey Island and stuff.

Yup, it's a hand-me-down Athlon X2 with 1 GB RAM, a a 1GB HDD, and an onboard ATI X1300.

I'm totally thinking about sneaking the Monkey Island series, Space Quest, Quest for Glory, Police Quest, and Day of the Tentacle on there.

*EDIT*

If I had two spare gamepads to give away, I'd also sneak Kawaks and some CPS1/2/3 and Neo Geo ROMs onto it, so the boys can have fun beating the snot out of each other, or co-op Metal Slug.

Holering wrote:

There's Slackware. You can do a custom bootstrap with distcc, but if you don't know scripting you'll have to learn it. Slackware is already 486 optimized BTW. I think it is the longest lasting Linux distro to support floppies too. Slackware is really cool because you don't need the internet to do stuff like bootstrapping (at least after you've downloaded everything you know you want), and support isn't scattered all over the place. It is the only distro that is actually Unix; no joke. It is even more Unix (way more), than Mac OS. It's a freakin' clone of Unix and then some!

That's still around? That's the distro I used to build a stripped down, custom build of for that home made WLAN controller. We picked it, since the target chip on the SBC was an AMD Geode (which was 486 or 586 class, IIRC).

ElectricMonk wrote:

That's still around? That's the distro I used to build a stripped down, custom build of for that home made WLAN controller. We picked it, since the target chip on the SBC was an AMD Geode (which was 486 or 586 class, IIRC).

You're right! I recommend Puppy Linux. That one is still around and a lot better for older PCs.

I think it's great to start kids early with the twin annoyances of using linux and out of date hardware. Sets them up not to be disappointed later in life when they go to work ["00 but our uni had a supercomputer" yeah w/e]. Then again they are probably used to android so it may be no big deal.

Oops, got out of the wrong side of bed again 🤣.

leileilol wrote:

I would consider early Pentium II as 'barely XPable', and that's not something I would install Ubuntu on.

If an XP-powered school PC is slow, chances are it's a Pentium IV at least (Dell Dimensions likely) and has some drive-by installed spyware sucking its resources, and 340 pixels of toolbar height latched on its IE6 at the minimum.

That sounds EXACTLY like the PCs at my old high school, circa 3 years ago. Apparently, the've switched over to Macs since then. 🤣

Seems at the rate Windows versions are set to expire (no more updates), a linux is definitely the way to go 😉
The last time I had to use a Windows XP in a school was horrible 😉

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

That sounds EXACTLY like the PCs at my old high school, circa 3 years ago. Apparently, the've switched over to Macs since then. 🤣

and it's probably running at 60hz with a glossy monitor blinded by the flourescent lights

I also think the machines should run XP fine. There is certainly something amiss, my guess would be that XP disable DMA for the hard disk (experienced that one several times). A missing driver for the X1300 would also explain a lot. Hard to say without inspecting the machines personally.

I recently worked on an eMachines with the X1300, Athlon 64, and XP. It was useable for what it was. Keep in mind that some of the C521s might have actually shipped with Vista originally! The X1300 on-board video should have a WDDM driver available. I would throw Windows 7 or 8.1 32-bit on there and see how it runs. It might actually run better than XP for some reason. I have a Dell Dim E520 here (Intel version of your machine in a full tower) and it was much faster running Windows 7 and 8.1 with 1GB of RAM than the XP MCE2005 it came with.

Take back what I said about Puppy Linux. Use Ubuntu.