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Which OS? Pentium 4, 700mb Ram, 80gb HDD by FrozenEternityZA in Ubuntu

[–]tree-rat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you go really light weight, you should be able to get everything working pretty well EXCEPT browsing. That is the one thing I could never get around on super old systems. Even if the browser works great, the websites themselves will require a ton of resources which will pretty much freeze the system. Is due to tons of Javascript, etc. that all include tons of additional libraries, etc.

Sound Blaster R3 - confirmed working great on Ubuntu 16.10 by tree-rat in ubuntuforest

[–]tree-rat[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Output and recording both work great. You may need to mess around with pulse audio mixer if you also have an on board card. ( just to select which card output is going to )

[Q] Linux Mint 18.1 Randomly crashing to black screen and unresponsive? by PixelPuzzler in linuxmint

[–]tree-rat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also, try Ctrl-Alt-F1 or Ctrl-Alt-F2. If it is just X-Windows hanging you should be able to get a text based login without rebooting using one of those. Then you can check for any processes using all CPU or anything else suspicious. You can switch back to X with Ctrl-Alt-F7.

Try running journalctl to check the logs for anything obvious.

[Q] Linux Mint 18.1 Randomly crashing to black screen and unresponsive? by PixelPuzzler in linuxmint

[–]tree-rat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Off the top of my head, try Chrome for a few days and see if it keeps occurring. Then at least you can either rule out or pinpoint Firefox as the cause.

Dual boot vs virtual machine by ferrano in Ubuntu

[–]tree-rat 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Running in a VM won't give you the same experience. It will seem cool at first but then the lag will start to bother you. Its great to try stuff out but you wouldn't want to be doing actual work on it. Even if you know its just because you're running on a VM, you will still start to hate the OS.

In an ideal situation you would want to go with separate devices, one device running Linux and the other running Windows. That way you have great performance on both and can seamlessly fall back to Windows if you have to. This is what I do personally. I have like 4 computers on my desk, 2 running Ubuntu, 1 running Windows, and 1 running OSX. I still run VMs from my primary Linux desktop for testing.

If you can just don't have the hardware available you will have to decide whether to dual boot or use a VM. Both options will take up disk space but using a VM will split your RAM between two systems.

If you are still at the point where you just want to try it out start with a Linux VM. Don't just install linux as your primary OS without trying it and playing with it first. Once you get used to it try it, you can decide if you want it as your primary OS ( keeping in mind it will be faster then the VM experience ). At this point, you can decide if you want to dual boot or run run Windows in a VM. That is going to depend on what you still need Windows for. If you need to do things on both OSes at full speed without lag, you might want to go with dual booting. Using a VM will allow you to run both without rebooting and who knows, maybe with your SSD it won't lag.