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I've been thinking it's time to upgrade my trusty Dell Inspiron 531. Although quite happy with the seven year old system, I am thinking of just replacing the Motherboard, CPU and RAM.*
The last time I did an upgrade like this was back in the days when the original Athlon was a big deal, so I'm feeling quite out of date. A couple of hours trolling through various shopping sites hasn't helped.
What I really could use is some real world advice on what products or features don't play well with Linux, especially Mint. I'm hoping to pull all of this together without spending more than about $250. Not a gamer, not doing massive heavy duty stuff, don't overclock, probably can live for years with 8 gigs of RAM. Do have dual monitors. Mostly just run what installs with Mint, plus Windows Vista in Virtualbox once or twice a month.
For instance, is UEFI BIOS still an issue? Are there certain things that still absolutely don't work with Linux? Suggestions and warnings please!
* Haven't considered whether the Dell has some odd MB spec that nothing else will fit into.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Thursday October 23 2014, @11:47PM
I have yet to find a motherboard or CPU that straight up doesn't work with Linux, all the way from a Pentium 166 (though Ubuntu won't boot on those) to my FX 8350. Basically anything made in the last 14 years should run mint (provided that it meets the minimum hardware requirements, which most of that stuff does). What you should really care about is which GPUs are compatible, since driver compatibility can be a major sticking point for Linux.
As for UEFI, just enable CSM boot on whatever motherboard you get and you can expect not to experience any problems. I'm fairly sure that if you REALLY want a 3+ TB hard drive, then Mint 17 should work perfectly fine with a UEFI firmware.
Source:
I have run either Ubuntu, Debian, or Mint on the following systems (I can't give some info because I may not have these systems anymore):
FX 8350 with Sabertooth 990fx motherboard and Radeon HD 7870 (keep in mind that RAM and HDD shouldn't matter that much as long as it's DDR3)
A10 5700 with some crappy motherboard (it's tiny, but I can just feel the cheapness radiating off of it), and integrated AMD graphics (keep in mind that this GPU doesn't always play nice with Mint and the official AMD drivers due to a memory leak that you have to add commands to grub to fix).
Dual Katmai Pentium III on a really nice Gigabyte board for the time. Has a Rage12 graphics card.
Some godawful IBM Thinkcentre with a Pentium D
A laptop with an A6-5200. Mint runs well but the UI (MATE) is choppy for some reason.
A K6-II @ 400 MHz with some Compaq motherboard. It worked with debian only.
Some others that I've probably forgotten.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by jackb_guppy on Friday October 24 2014, @12:04AM
I post at least through a K6-2 400. Was wife's machine with an early ATI card with a TV tuner built-in. Now the firewall! 10GB drives run for years and years.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Friday October 24 2014, @05:18AM
Nice. I wish I could run *buntu or mint on my K6-II, but it evidently lacks cmpxchg. Also, isn't it nice to browse a site that isn't so laden with javascript that it makes you want to throw your computer into a wall?
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by jackb_guppy on Sunday October 26 2014, @01:32AM
I understand the cmpxchg issue. Was trying to find a version to run on I-Opener C6/200MHz /128M /18G machine with only 1 USB1 port - for a USB to 10BaseT interface. I found PUPPY 4.3.1 works well, or build a GENTOO - but all the major browsers are also cmov support and do not work on lite windows version, seam to want gnome or kde.
It gets back to "systemd issue" - tying one pack to another. In case, it is tying code to hardware. Linux, run on everything. Intel, ARM, PowerPC, ... but not pre-P4!
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Sunday October 26 2014, @02:56AM
Linux still runs (well is another matter) on my dual Pentium III box. I'd recommend one of the BSDs for an older machine, but NetBSD crashes on my k6... I wonder if FreeBSD would work.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.