What's the best way to get an Xp Cd that's legal for an old pentium 3 Gateway with no Xp Coa?
Most of the $85 Ebay offers are most likely illegal copies and this pc won't run Vista.

Surprisingly (since I thought MS was to stop selling XP at the end of June), you can still buy legal copies of XP retail. ENU in Hillsboro and by the Portland airport has copies of XP Home for $100 (no end user support from MS but why would you need it at this point?). Fry's may be even cheaper. I snagged a copy of XP Pro in June for about $140, so they may have XP Home for under $100. Not necessarily the cheapest but 100% legal at least.

XP at this point may have all the drivers your old Gateway needs, but it still might be a good idea to download them from Gateway's website anyway and put them on a CD or something ahead of time so you have them at the ready after XP install.

Andrew

And if you have a large enough hard drive, you can do a dual boot of XP and Ubuntu. I have installed a full-blown Ubuntu on a 4GB flash card so 4GB is all you need (although 4GB is probably a lot of space on an old Pentium III).

Have you ever considered upgrading the hardware? I know you are probably trying to save money, but you can get some incredible deals on new hardware at Fry's. I recently bought a Pentium Dual Core 2.2GHZ CPU + motherboard combo for $79 at Fry's - and it's screaming fast. Pentium Dual Core is a bridge product between Celeron and Core 2 Duo but Pentium Dual Core is basically a stripped-down Core 2 with less cache and some of the power saving stuff disabled. This weekend Fry's has a Celeron combo for $49.99 if you really want to cheap out although I'd personally go for $30 more for the Dual Core. You can get DDR2 RAM for dirt cheap nowadays, too - sometimes $30 for 2GB.

You might not be able to install a new motherboard in your old Gateway, though (power supply connectors may not be new enough) and the Fry's ECS motherboards have only one IDE connector for CD/DVD drives; they have four SATA ports so expect you to use a SATA hard drive.

Andrew

I think that the new crop of mini-notebooks (Asus Eee, MSI Wind, Acer Aspire) might have saved XP for a while. Many of these brand new computers are being sold with XP and support is rumored to continue to 2011.

I'm surprised that XP is still sold as the default OS with any new computer. Dell now offers a "downgrade" with its Small Business computers (e.g. Vostro, Lattitude) for an extra $100 - ouch! Might as well buy my own copy since then I can use it on another computer later if need be.

Intel - which must be thrilled that MS Vista requires so much computing power and thus faster CPUs - has itself announced it will not adopt Vista internally for its own use! My Intel friends are pretty happy about that...

Andrew

"I'm surprised that XP is still sold as the default OS with any new computer."

Check out the "bestsellers" list from Amazon, The brand-new Asus Eee 1000 with XP Home is usually near the top of the list (when they are in stock- supply is still iffy).

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/pc/ref=pd_dp_ts_e_1

I decided to keep Ubuntu, until i can get on a newer pc! Thanks.
I get to use Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 with Flash 9 and Java, so i'm doing ok visiting websites anyway.
I get bored, buy small hard drives and like to play with computer operating systems!
I have to keep one hard drive bootable all the time! Yesterday i downloaded Mandriva, but wasn't sucessful in making a setup cd for it! :-)

Itsvern--

Did you get the ISO of Mandriva One?

A couple days ago I got Ubuntu Studio installed in a seperate partition alongside 98......I use the DOS programme LOADLIN to start it.

(Although I have had about 99% success restoring my boot record by doing FDISK /MBR after a GRUB installation goes awry--and I have noticed that, when detting it up as a dual-boot along Win98 it does every time--it's still not 100% reliable. LOADLIN is its own programme, on the C: drive, loaded from a batch file at the DOS prompt, and I like it way better personally.)

And now I am considering erasing UbStudio and just loading K-Ubuntu instead, then installing the recording programmes I need into it. UbStudio ships with the crappy, inferior, dumbed-down Gnome desktop and I don't know how to put KDE into it manually, so I guess I'll just build my own makeshift "K-Ubuntu Studio" instead.... ;o)

Next challenge: getting the Ubuntu/Debian version of Audacity to actually record from the line-in without crashing!

=================================================

"I get bored, buy small hard drives and like to play with computer operating systems!"

Same here.....one of my little "side projects" right now is getting my vintage 1994 Packard Bell CD-ROM distribution of Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (complete with MSDOS 6.22 even) running on the Optiplex, "Just to See If I Can Do It.™"

Anyone remember "Navigator"? ;o)

You do know you can install KDE from Ubuntu instead of just re-installing Kubuntu right? Basically the same thing. I did it on my laptop, so I can now choose from Gnome or KDE as a desktop manager when I login. Underneath, it's the same Linux.

Andrew

I know it is possible, but I have no idea how to do it. How would I go about doing that?

(Hey, I'm a DOS dinosaur. Things in DOS are done just a little bit differently than in Linux. Besides, I discovered the hard way one time that speaking the DOS command language to a Linux terminal is kinda' like speaking, say, Klingon to someone who only knows, say, Deutsch..... ;o)

And I would want to get rid of Gnome completely; that's hard drive space I could put to far better use.

C:\>tlhIngan hol dj'Atl a?
Bad Kommando oder dateiname

I'll jump in, as I just got a new-to-me notebook with Ubuntu on it, from that famous fabulous place in Portland you can get this type stuff

Things I *hate* about Ubuntu:
1. Gnome
2. Integrated software that's bundled tighter than Windows (for example, if I want to uninstall Evolution [which I'll never use], I'll lose about half the desktop functionality [see #1 above])
3. Hates dial-up, when I dial-in it refuses to recognize that any type of network exists.
4. Firefox sucks compared to SeaMonkey, always seems to start up in "offline mode" because of #3 above, and the most recent version of SeaMonkey available is 1.1.9 (current version is 1.1.11).

However, at least it's a working OS with more available than Damn Small Linux, which started as a great idea but went downhill fast.

I should mention I've tried plain vanilla Debian Linux on another computer I have, however the install failed because Linux in general hates dial-up. Yeah, it's "too slow" for most people, but it's what I've got.

OK, I've ranted enough , here's what I was going to originally post:
When I asked on another forum, I was directed to this website for something else, and realized it has some really great basic tutorials, including how to install KDE on Ubuntu:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/install-kde-kubuntu-on-ubuntu/

"Linux in general hates dial-up"

Perhaps I am missing the point, but my Asus Eee, which uses Xandros, a fork of Debian, seems to do fine on dial-up.

Newflyer--
Thanks for the link......looks like down in the comments and responses, they show how to install from the CDs. (That's what I have.) So I may be busy in a couple of nights......




I think your modem problem could be something related to the particular combination of hardware you have, probably whatever combination of PCI cards you have plugged into the motherboard (assuming you have any.) I tried connecting to my People's PC file using their litle dialler programme running in Wine on the Optiplex, through a CIS (Rockwell clone) controllerless modem (choke...) which was pulled working from my Aptiva, and it seemed to dial up and run just fine without any complaint.

On my 98/Ubuntu/Mandriva box, using the same software (Wine/dialler/network settings) config and the exact same PCI modem I had in the Optiplex, I had the same trouble you described. It choked, pretty much.

If you actually have a sound card (as opposed to an on-board chipset) a PCI conflict might also possibly be to blame......I had hell several times in 98 getting my Sound Blaster to produce sound after installing a modem, and every time ended up having to reinstall the Sound Blaster software. But in Linux that's all pretty much self-configuring, I have noticed.

Both boxes have identical Sound Blaster AudioPCI 64V sound cards.

For some reason, I have noticed Sound Blasters and PCI modems don't always like to play nicely with each other...............

(Just my own wild and highly uneducated throrem! Please don't take my words above directly to heart, because the chances are good that I could be completely wrong!!)