One of the things I like most about Linux is it’s ability to surprise me.   A few months back I tried Xubuntu 6.06 on a 500 MHz Celeron system and just couldn’t get it to run.   Recently a friend gave me some old motherboards and one of them had a 400 MHz Celeron processor on it.   I’ve had a lot of fun installing Linux on older hardware and, after trying several different "flavors" of Linux, Debian Sarge has become my favorite because it seems always to work even though a lot of post-install tweaks are required.   That being said, I felt that this 400 MHz box would wind up running Debian Sarge but I have a small collection of recently downloaded ISO files so I decided to experiment with some of them.   I burned CDs for Caos, SaxenOS, DesktopBSD and PC-BSD.   Those last two aren’t actually Linux distros, they’re flavors of BSD but Linux and BSD are similar enough to use many of the same software applications and I’ve read several articles which suggest that BSD is good with older hardware.

Caos and DesktopBSD wouldn’t run on the computer.   SaxonOS and PC-BSD both ran poorly enough to confirm my initial inclination to install Debian but I was in no hurry and felt inclined to experiment.   I had downloaded the ISO file for Xubuntu 6.06.1 but hadn’t tried it yet (how different could it be from 6.06 anyway?) but what the heck.   I burned a CD and give it a try.

Surprise, surprise Xubuntu 6.06.1 installed smoothly and ran beautifully.   Now I’ve got to decide whether or not I should make Xubuntu my default Linux choice for older hardware.   I guess what I’ve really learned is that Linux is changing more quickly than I imagined and I have a notably vivid imagination.

Don Crowder