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So I need to install an OS on a quite old PC. 1.6GHz CPU, 512 RAM.

I had no idea about this earlier today, so I tried to install ElementaryOS (12.04 Ubuntu derivative). GUI was useless, so I switched to console to at least find out system specs. However, one thing I noticed about GUI is that bottom dock-menu and top-bar are fine, but the main area of desktop split into two identical parts. Each half was displaying the same thing but the picture became extremely narrow. Also, desktop background picture was in some very strange colors, a lot of green and red. Like as if we only had 3 bits for each of RGB components.

I have never seen anything like this before. However, I realised that I should find a lightweight distro for this PC. I would also like a bit more MSWindows-like interface (I am not going to use this computer, and the people there are more used to Windows.

I liked the view of Lubuntu screenshots. Seems very simple and the system requirements are low. However, has anyone encountered a graphical bug like this before? Could it be that it happens again? This splitting image makes the system unusable.

Some system specs photos

sudo lshw -short sudo lshw : CPU sudo lshw : VGA controller

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Marian
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  • The graphics problem seems an initialization problem, S3 used to be very well supported, but maybe not in recent distros. Which distro is usable on such a system is primarily a matter of opinion. – Timo Feb 21 '14 at 16:03

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In my experience even lbuntu uses a fair amount of resources. I have had good experiences with Puppy on old equipment, it rejuvenated an unusable Windows 95 machine.

This post expands on the subject : What is a free, small Unix/Linux OS?

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X Tian
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