Free open source operating system, wha? (1 Viewer)

[shower another shower]

Have a mate thats done loads of work on my boiler. His girfriends yongfla's lappy has XP and sucks big time. He's only young and probably has no time to be worrying about virusesesas and that. wanna stick some sort of linux on it so he can surf and play some online games. What do I do? Thanks.

 

[pete]

If there's a bit of space you should be able to stick Ubuntu on and leave XP as a dual boot option.

 

[shower another shower]

xp has driven the laptop to a halt. wanna wipe it and put a freshh OS on it. Ubuntu still the way to go?

 

[pete]

i'd still leave the original OS in place so you can avoid the "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY [X]" problems later

 

[shower another shower]

roger.

 

[logo]

My advice: install Lubuntu

 

[Ferox13]

you can boot the computer with a live CD with no need to install which might give him an idea about the OS. I heard Knoppix but I have never used it.

 

[pissypants]

I've tried Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Lubuntu, but Linux Mint would be my recommendation. For a really shit machine try puppy linux. Amazing for such a small, fast, light package. Ubuntu can be a bollox on resources on older machines.

 

[shower another shower]

Are there Flash players for all these Linux builds? This lad is 12 years old and will be mostly using his lappy for online games and youtubing.

 

[pissypants]

Are there Flash players for all these Linux builds? This lad is 12 years old and will be mostly using his lappy for online games and youtubing.

Any of the ones I mentioned above: yes.

 

[pissypants]

Are there Flash players for all these Linux builds? This lad is 12 years old and will be mostly using his lappy for online games and youtubing.

BY the way, I'm assuming here you don't mean for him to use it for PC games. Flash is fine, but in terms of gaming there's only a select few that will work on linux. e.g. Featured Linux Games

 

[Gambra]

Don't leave XP on it, support is going to be discontinued by Microsoft in the next few weeks meaning any viruses written for it will run rampant.

 

[pete]

The end of XP support just means no more new security patches from Microsoft. Yes, there will be new exploits released, and they won't be patched by Microsoft*, and it's not going to be much fun for existing XP users (of which there are millions) who have nothing protecting their machine, but the sky isn't falling quite yet - the end of support doesn't mean XP will stop working, firewalls will stop firewalling or antivirus software will stop antivirusing.

* actually, they will be, since many enterprise customers and governments have paid up big money to maintain existing support with Microsoft. Whether the resulting patches will ever be released publicly is another matter.

 

[Gambra]

It is 12 years old though, its time to move on.

 

[pete]

absolutely, but my original point was you never want to be "that guy who deleted all my files on me"

 

[ann post]

i have my old xp machine and all that sailed on it on a hard drive. i've never needed it.

 

[shower another shower]

Yea, he had no attachment to XP and was feckk on the puter. Ubuntu.
It's a net machine for him.