Linux on Dell Inspiron 1501

Nick@713

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What would be the best Linux distro to install on my old Dell Inspiron 1501 with 4 GB of RAM?
 


Hi @Nick@713 , and welcome to linux.org :)

New What would be the best Linux distro to install on my old Dell Inspiron 1501 with 4 GB of RAM?

How long is a piece of string? :D

Seriously, there are 500 or more of the suckers.

Best bet is to make friends with https://distrowatch.com/ and its page hit ranking https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity , then link to some of the top ones perhaps and take a look at a bunch of them and see what attracts you.

Have a small supply of USB sticks or a larger number of blank DVDs, and then you can download an .iso and burn it, then use that as a Live medium to see what you might be getting.

Ask all the questions you want, your thread title is broad until you get a Linux installed, then you might start a new thread.

Let us know a little more about the Dell specs or point us to a site for same, we just want to see that the unit is 64-bit architecture or otherwise, but 4GB RAM should be sufficient to run any Linux.

I'm on a road trip now but back more often in 3 days time, but others will swing by to help.

Cheers

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz
 
Hi Nick, and welcome to the forums! RAM is often a deciding factor on older computers, but 4 GB should be enough for you to run any distro that you would like. If you are new to Linux, some of the most often recommended distros are Linux Mint, Linux Lite, Ubuntu, Zorin OS, and more. These are all from the Ubuntu/Debian family, but there are other families too, such as Red Hat and Arch which each have many derivatives of their own. And there are even more besides. DistroWatch has a "Top 100" list that is a good starting point to look around and where you'll find the most common distros.

I'm pretty sure that your Dell is old enough that it has a "legacy BIOS" instead of the newer UEFI firmware. This is helpful too so that you can probably install anything. Some distros are not yet ready for UEFI.

Are you planning to install Linux only? Or do you want to dual-boot with Windows? Dual-booting is a bit easier with the legacy BIOS systems too, but still needs care during the install or Windows could be broken. A full Linux-only install is quick and easy, probably finished in about a half-hour.

Since your laptop has a DVD drive, a good way to go forward is to download a few distros that interest you and burn them to DVD. You have to use the "burn image" feature on your DVD burning software to burn the Linux .iso files so that the DVD's will be bootable. With 2 or 3 (or more) to start out, you can boot on each DVD and run that distro in "live mode" so that you get a pretty reasonable test drive of what it will be like, and you can determine if it detects and uses your system hardware like sound and wireless. Running on DVD is slower than a full install... much slower. But it's a great way to take a peek without making any permanent changes to your hard drive.

Let us know if you have any questions and we'll be glad to try to help you along.

Cheers
 
Since your laptop has a DVD drive, a good way to go forward is to download a few distros that interest you and burn them to DVD. You have to use the "burn image" feature on your DVD burning software to burn the Linux .iso files so that the DVD's will be bootable. With 2 or 3 (or more) to start out, you can boot on each DVD and run that distro in "live mode" so that you get a pretty reasonable test drive of what it will be like, and you can determine if it detects and uses your system hardware like sound and wireless. Running on DVD is slower than a full install... much slower. But it's a great way to take a peek without making any permanent changes to your hard drive.

A good source of LiveCDs is here >>> https://livecdlist.com/
 

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