Best Linux for my old laptop!?

[newtolinux123]

hey guys as my name says im very new to Linux and have tried 3 different ones on my old laptop with no success. (Toshiba equium a110-233 made in 2006)
i was wondering if anyone knows of a Linux which will be supported as i really like the look and feel of Linux!
thanks very much, Ryan

[rokytnji]

From what I have read on google. The only recent distros I saw installed on your model was Debian and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

You might give the new Puppy Linux a whirl running as a Live CD session also.

[newtolinux123]

From what I have read on google. The only recent distros I saw installed on your model was Debian and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

You might give the new Puppy Linux a whirl running as a Live CD session also.

thanks very much for the reply my friend, i will give it a try

[reed9]

When you say "no success", can you be more specific? It would be helpful to know which distros you tried and what specifically went wrong.

[claudiu]

If you are new to the linux world try Ubuntu desktop edition.
If you wanna learn how linux ticks install Gentoo, but do it the old fasion way, it will take you a day but it will be worth it, it's a good learning experience.

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

The best thing to do is to keep experimenting with different distros until you find the best match to suit your hardware and your personal tastes in an operating system. You'll find that countless users have been distro-hoppers for months or even years at a time looking for that perfect distribution. In the end, only you can decide what's best for you and your hardware.

Unless you have special requirements, I generally recommend that new users start with the top 10 or so distributions listed at DistroWatch.com in the "page hits ranking" list, and keep going down the list until they find what they like.

Hope it goes well for you.

[penguin2]

After checking out the info on your laptop, I think the main concerns are the wifi card and the video chipset/card.

I can only speculate based on what I've read but I will guess that the wifi card is:
Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945ABG network connection

and the video card is:
Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950

To confirm, you could try any LiveCD, start up a terminal console and type:

lspci

Then post the results.

I think most recent distros (such as the top 10 suggested) should work and although the video card is a bit weak, it is quite common in many old laptops, the drivers should be in the kernel.

You might have to enable firmware for the wifi card, though. That could be one of the reasons you had trouble: you probably found you didn't have wireless but it's not hard to get it working with Intel wifi cards as far as I know.

Anyway, I'm no expert so I'm just suggesting a few things to try.

[mahela007]

I've had problems with the ubuntu live CD on old/low powered machines. Just to a bit of research before trying it out... Xubuntu might be a good choise (a distro for low performance PCs).. but personally I didn't like how it looked.