This is a description of an experiment to install Linux Mint 6 (Felicia) onto an old PC. The PC is branded as a Time machine, and has an Intel 810 chipset on the Gigabyte made motherboard (Full specs here). It is fitted with an Intel 700Mhz Pentium III (coppermine) processor and has only 192 MB of ram fitted. Both the graphics and sound are from the onboard Intel chips. I have fitted an RTL8139 based PCI ethernet adaptor, and there is some sort of old analogue TV adapter fitted. Finally, it has an old Philips DVD burner fitted that no longer seems to burn disks, but still reads them. For the purposes of this experiment I have fitted a 40GB Seagate hard drive that originally had Windows 95 installed on it.

 One problem with Linux Mint 6 is that you can only install it from the desktop when it is running in Live CD mode. This takes a lot of memory, and it caused my PC to freeze up. The problem was that there was no linux swap space on the hard disk. So it was time to reboot and use a very useful tool. That tool is gParted Live - a very small, very light, specialised Linux distro that provides a simple graphical interface to partition hard disks. (This link may, or may not, directly download the 100MB iso image)

 I deleted the Windows 95 partition and made three new partitions (all done just using the mouse). The first partition was about 6.5 GB for the root filesystem. The second was a 1 GB linux swap partition, and the rest of the space I used to make the /home partition (where all my personal files will be stored). For the root and home partitions I used the default ext2 filesystem. It's not quite as robust as, say, ext3, but it does make slightly better use of a small(ish) hard disk. I suspect it might also be a tiny bit faster for a low powered machine.

 With the disk partitioned Linux Mint 6 finally fired up in Live CD mode - and worked. It took a very long time to get to this point. I had time to eat my breakfast and do the washing up afterwards, and I still had to wait a bit. With everything settled down it was still exceedingly sluggish, but I got the installer fired up and answered all the very simple questions. The next bit was disk partitioning. It displays a graphical representation of the hard disk, and options to partition automatically, semi automatically, or manually. I chose manual. One strange thing is that it didn't appear that the swap partition I had made was being used. So maybe I was just impatient when I chose to use gParted to make the partitions.

 The next display shows both the graphical representation of the partitions, and also a list of them. I highlighted the first partition and clicked on the Edit button. By default it says "do not use this partition" change that in the drop down box to ext2, tick the format box and finally set the mount point to /.  I left the swap partition as it was, nad then moved to the final partition. Once again I chose to edit it. I changed the "do not use" to ext2, ticked the format box, and set the mount point to /home.

 With the partitioning set up I clicked on forward to set a user name and password, the machine name, and finally ticked the log in automatically box. Logging in automatically is not the most secure option, but in the home, where no one else is likely to touch the machine, or if they are they are probably friendly, then it is handy. Then it's just a matter of sitting back while all the files are copied over to the hard disk.

 It took a long time, but finally it all installed, and now boots up reasonably quickly from the hard drive. Things are still a little slow right now, but I expect it to speed up soon. I used a magazine cover disk that had Linux Mint 6 on it, and it's a little out of date. The automatic installer is now starting on the long chore of installing 257 software updates. Some are tiny files, but others, such as the upgrade to Firefox 3, are rather larger. It is suggesting this will take just over 12 minutes. I suspect it will be a bit longer.

 Later on I will write some conclusions in a part 2. Maybe I'll even get out the stopwatch and give some timings or something. For now I can say that it's installed, everything works, and it's even set the right resolution for my 1280x1024 LCD monitor. I think once the software updates are done it will behave reasonably responsively.