Wannabe Linux user

[eddeering]

I took an electronics course last week, each day I walked by the classroom they were teaching linux (Fedora). It sparked my curiosity. I am trying to install it a Toshiba laptop (formatted), A105-S101. I get closer and closer each time I try. Any helpful hints would be appreciated.

[techieMoe]

I did a Google search for your model, and came up with this:

Toshiba Satellite A105-S101 (Celeron M 1.6 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 60 GB HDD) Laptop reviews - CNET Reviews

Are those your correct specs? If so, you won't be able to use most modern Linux distributions including Fedora with that little RAM. The ATI card will need extra work as well. Most of the other features I see are perfectly fine for running a normal distro.

If you can't get more RAM for the laptop, you'll have to limit your Linux experience to either text-mode only or use a lightweight distribution such as Puppy, Damn Small, or something based on one of those.

[Freston]

Welcome to the forums!

Vector will scream on a machine like that, and be graphic. In fact, anything without KDE or Gnome as desktop will do pretty well. But techieMoe is right, the really modern mainstream distro's will be disappointing in terms of how fast they run.
Though RAM is much more the problem than CPU... 1.6Ghz is fine.

[rokytnji]

NimbleX will run with those specs. I run it on 900mhz,256mb ram, Amrel Laptop with no problems.

[xRAVExHEAVENx]

I would try a minimal Gentoo install running XFCE4.

Only using 392MB RAM running Pidgin, Xarchiver, 2 Firefox windows, terminal, Transmission, and WINE (Eating most of the memory)

[Bemk]

You are taking 1.6MHz as a CPU minimum, but I'm running Ubuntu Hardy on a CPU which is 1.4GHz, and on a Notebook which is 1.0 and 128MB ram(which goes rather slow, but that one works fine too, but slow).