[vox-tech] Need some help choosing a linux flavor for an old laptop

[Alex Mandel]

Ken Bloom wrote:
> On Tuesday 20 June 2006 00:34, Kyle Oliveira wrote:
>> I'm helping a friend upgrade an old Inspiron 3000 so she can check
>> email and do Word documents while she's in France. I decided to run
>> linux as the OS since I've heard it's more efficient that windows in
>> that sort of situation and I've kinda narrowed it down to three
>> options: cAos (because it's supposedly good with older hardware),
>> MEPIS (same reason, plus I heard it does networking stuff well), and
>> Mandriva (simply because Matloff's walkthrough is easily available).
>> I was wondering which one would be the best to install considering:
>> *The laptop is running on a Pentium I with 128 MB of RAM. It also has
>> a *blank* 30 GB hard drive
> 
> Any distribution should support this about equally well -- you may want 
> a somewhat stripped down desktop environment for speed.
> 
>> *There is no RJ-45 port, per se - we have a USB to RJ 45 adaptor and
>> a PCMCIA 56k modem
> 
> Any distribution should have the same support for these.
> 
>> *The installation needs to be fairly easy, she's already in France
>> with all the equipment. I'll probably be leading her through the
>> installation through some sort of written walkthrough (if you know
>> where to get one, that'd be nice too) and talking on the phone.
> 
> You might consider Ubuntu.
> 
> --Ken Bloom
> 

I can vouch for Ubuntu with XFCE will run in a usable manner on a PII 
333 at least better than Gnome and KDE did. I haven't tried Xubuntu 
which is ubuntu with XFCE as the default I believe, would make 
installing really simple.

You could always send a few discs in the same box and have an order of 
preference for trying them. Like try Xubuntu, if that doesn't work try 
Mandriva, etc. But this way all the options are there when you get on 
the phone.

Alex