Linux Flavour Advice

[lukusc]

Hi There,

I'm new to this forum and new to Linux as a desktop OS. I have plenty of experience running Linux servers of various flavours but the first thing I do is remove the GUI.

I'm building a desktop for some old folks who are currently using XP on a ****** old laptop (replacing it cause it runs so slow). The new machine isn't highly speced by any stretch of the imagination. P4, 500MB RAM, HD1 80 Gig, HD2 200 Gig.

My question is what Flavour should I be installing? What they need are the following...

- Open Office
- Firefox
- VLC
- Skype
- Some sort of general photo transfer software (advice welcome)
- Fast Obviously this will be a trade off in some regard but anything will be faster than what they have now
- Easy to maintain (that ones mostly for my benefit... Don't want phone calls every 5 min cause they have plugged something in and now its not working)

I have a copy of CentOS 5 which I have installed at the moment and that seems OK but just wondered if anyone had recommendations?

Cheers

[meton_magis]

I wouldn't recomend CentOS for old folks (unless they were unix admins when they were not so old folks.)

Fedora and ubuntu are easy to use, but are a bit too bleeding edge, you will have stupid issues crop up all the time that you won't want to fix remotely.

an ubuntu long term release may do ok, I don't know.

I hear good things about mandrivia, but I've never used it myself.

Suse is easy to use, but the future of it is in doubt as novell is having an IP auction at the moment.

I hear REALLY good things about Linux Mint. It is ubuntu, but more useable for people who don't care about free software requirements (for example, it includes encumbered codecs.) I have never used it, so I can't comment.

[lukusc]

Thanks Meton. Thats given me a really good place to start. Cheers!!

[lukusc]

Hi Meton,

thanks again. I checked out 'Linux Mint 10' first and had to look no further. That does the job and then some. Cheers!!

[meton_magis]

Hi Meton,

thanks again. I checked out 'Linux Mint 10' first and had to look no further. That does the job and then some. Cheers!!

I really do need to get around to testing it. I'm just so familiar with redhat based systems that I don't really feel like changing

grats on finding what you needed.

[MASONTX]

Welcome to the forum. If you get to feeling advenurous, go to distrowatch.com and take a look at the hundreds of other linux distro's available. Most you can try as a live distro to see how you like them.

[lukusc]

Thanks MasonTX,

looks like a great site. Bookmarked. I'll be a regular visitor.

Cheers

[Dapper Dan]

I would never recommend this to a new Linux user, but since you know Linux minus "GUI." an exploration of CRUX Linux might be in order. CRUX can easily run all the apps you mention without complaint and is smokingly fast while very frugal with resources.

[lukusc]

Hi Dapper Dan,

I'm running with Mint 10 at the moment though it does seem a little heavy on the resources. I've downloaded CRUX and will try that out on a VM. I may have to change to that if performance becomes an issue. I really wanted something I could set up and forget so not sure if I'll be able to do that with CRUX in terms of auto updates etc. The people the PC is for were using XP but they are definatly not power users so avoiding regular phone calls is the key here. Having said that having a VNC backdoor will help so if needed CRUX is definatly an option.

Thanks for the advice!

Cheers

[MASONTX]

If you are happy with Mint, but want a lighter version, check out Mint LXDE.