Old Laptop - What distro?

Lumeycom

Lumeycom

Lumeycom

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I've got an oldish laptop, 1.5 celeron M and 512meg and want an easy to use/install distro thats pretty much for browsing and a bit of music playback.

What do you suggest?
 
Parted magic, slax or puppy these are not ful distros btw.

Or for fun try tiny core linux 10mb, although i was suprised at it using more memory than i thought it would.
 
That's basically the spec of my old laptop as well, I've had had Pclinux, mint, opensuse and a couple of others that I can't remember, I've left Ubuntu 8.10 on there now. It kept crashing on 9.04 and wouldn't load 9.10 at all.

Works fine for me :)
 
Take your personal preference of distro. Whatever you're comfortable with.

These threads shouldn't be "which distro for xxxx", they should be "which window manager for xxxx". The distro makes no difference, it's what you're running that makes it "beefy" or "light". As you can customise any linux distro by adding (or removing) anything you want, choose one that you feel comfortable with and change the WM. Job done.
 
Am typing on a very similar spec laptop on xubuntu 9.10 now and it flies. A lot quicker than ubuntu was. Im 100% sure that a properly configured debian or arch setup would be faster, but xubuntu is very very easy to setup.
 
i use linux mint with the kde desktop, works fine, with my old laptop, pretty surprised thinking it would be slow! I tried xubuntu, look pretty ugly but does the job!
 
XFCE can look good though - just like Gnome. At stock it's nothing special but a few modifications here and there and it's just as good as KDE4.

http://xfce-look.org/

Which is one of the reasons i think Debian should use it at stock instead of Gnome. It's not really competing well against Ubuntu so you need to market it as a lighting fast rock solid distro (which it is).
 
Just for ease of use (in my experience anyway) xubuntu would be the best to start with if you're not feeling particularly adventurous.
 
Best thing to do (if you're still deciding that is) is to download all available Live distributions:

OpenSuSE http://en.opensuse.org/Live_CD
FedoraCore http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD
Ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com/GetUbuntu/download

Or go here for the full list - http://www.livecdlist.com/

For an old laptop, I'd personally suggest using OpenSuSE as, in my humble opinion, has the best hardware support out there.

Also, if you have stolen the laptop from British Museum (The one that was buried with Tutankhamens pickled cadaver), then go for something like FluxBox GUI, there is, in all honesty a need to be GNOME or KDE bound.

Hope this helps.
 
.walls said:
Take your personal preference of distro. Whatever you're comfortable with.

These threads shouldn't be "which distro for xxxx", they should be "which window manager for xxxx". The distro makes no difference, it's what you're running that makes it "beefy" or "light". As you can customise any linux distro by adding (or removing) anything you want, choose one that you feel comfortable with and change the WM. Job done.
Click to expand...

I think you're oversimplifying it a bit there. A lot more goes into building a distro than simply slapping a kernel in, adding a desktop enviroment and window manager then installing a few programs.
 
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