christophe
I recently did this for an old AthlonXP, circa 2001.
I had to actually make a CD, since it wouldn’t boot via USB. It has an old GeForce2x video card. The antiX 17.4 CD booted up, but the video was horribly slow. And the system froze up on me during the installation process. I rebooted & used the safe mode option, and it used xvesa. That gave me passable performance, and I was able to install the system.
After reboot, I used the Control Centre to try to install the Nvidia video driver. It tried, but it eventually told me that the card is too old, and there is no supporting driver. So I just kept the xvesa driver. That’s the only method I know of to test out old hardware. You could try old kernels from the “antiX-cli-cc” terminal script, but I don’t know how old to go, except if someone could give you a lead on a specific kernel to try (that fits better with your particular hardware – and then beware of old, outdated kernels without recent security patches, if that matters to your situation). Perhaps trial & error, and give your specific hardware info on the forum if/when you get stuck?
Updating the kernel on live USB is an easy 2-step process. Dolphin Oracle has done a video tutorial on this. He goes through it very clearly (better that I could outline it). Of course, beware that a live USB may not boot on older hardware, and the performance would (I have to think) be better if installed to hdd, even if it were to boot via live usb.
To close my story: I had oodles of issues on my project. In addition to the nvidia video, this old machine doesn’t support SSE2, and the RAM is only 256 MB. I knew it wouldn’t be good for general usage, but I wanted to just see what I could do with it. I discovered that without SSE2 support, I had to remove flash to use the Palemoon non-sse2 browser (otherwise, it crashes). And it nearly chokes when running palemoon. (Links2 runs nicely, though.) So be prepared for sub-par performance with a 20-year-old computer…. Perhaps your music will work, though. You never know until you try…
Hope this helps.
- This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by christophe.
- This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by christophe.
antiX on everything, since 2017