William Lee Valentine wrote: > I am wondering whether a current Debian distribution can be installed > and run on an older Pentium III computer. (I have Debian 11.2 on a DVD.) > > The computer is > > Dell Dimension XPS T500: Intel Pentium III processor (Katnai) > memory: 756 megabytes, running at 500 megahertz > IDE disc drive: 60 gigabytes > Debian partition: currently 42 gigabytes > Debian 6.0: Squeeze > > If I install Debian 11.2, will it run on this machine? Will it preserve > the files and directories that I have on Squeeze?
I'm going to assume you already have squeeze installed. You should be able to upgrade in place from 6 to 7 to 8 to 9 to 10 to 11. On a machine that old and slow, I suspect it would take one day per upgrade. However, it should work. If you can find a SATA interface card and a cheap SSD, it will improve performance immensely. Depending on the part of the world you are in, you can probably find a much faster machine being given away or sold second-hand for under $100. If this is your only machine, I recommend not upgrading it, but finding a new one if at all possible, then installing on the new one and transferring over data from the old one. -dsr-
