Looking for a distribution suitable for old laptop

[DimaNovo]

Hello

I have Thinkpad R40
intel pentium 1.4 GHz
250 MB RAM
40G HDD

I've got it with old XP ( SP1) and installed Ubuntu 9.1
surprisingly things went well and it's working - i can surf, watch movies but there are issues with the graphics. I was told that it's due to the old chipset and low RAM.

I'm looking for a distribution that is user friendly, will allow me to surf the net, watch movies and do other simple things on this machine.

thanks

[devils casper]

Hi and Welcome !

Ubuntu has Gnome Desktop Environment and its a bit heavy for machine having 256MB RAM. Try Xubuntu. Its Ubuntu + Xfce desktop environment. I will work fine in your machine.

There are a lot of other alternatives too. Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux etc. I would suggest you to check this poll too.

[DimaNovo]

I'll try that

[reed9]

My current favorite lightweight distro is Linux Mint Fluxbox edition. The best out of the box implementation of Fluxbox I've seen.

Unity Linux is also looking to be nice, but they haven't come out with a stable release yet.

[devils casper]

All of us have our own prefrences and it really depends on our needs and taste. Most of Lightweight distros work fine without tweaking.
Debain Netinstall + specific necessary packages is best for all types of machine, imho.

[whych]

Debian with gnome runs fine on my old celeron p3 desktop.
You can also try eeebuntu - optimised for netbooks, but should work on your notbook. The advantage is that it has all the Internet and movie stuff built in as standard.
The beta version is now debian based and not ubuntu.