Choosing a distro... yet again!

[ephonk]

So the "what distro is best for me" has been done to death, I'm sure... but I have a somewhat different wrinkle.

I was recovering an XP machine for a friend - it had been stolen and when they got it back they found that "it has a password on it now!" Well, actually, it had been flattened and reloaded with an illegal copy of XP. So I figured this was a great opportunity to introduce them to Linux.

I soon found that the machine is too feeble to run the noob-friendly distros I'd usually plop down on it. Xubuntu is too heavy for it. Puppy rocks like a maniac on it, but it's not really noob-friendly. I just know they'd open a menu and be completely turned off by what they saw there, recycle the machine and buy a new Vista box.

So there's the thing: I need a grandma-friendly distro that can run on older hardware, in this case a Sony Vaio P4. I have yet to see such a thing. Puppy comes really close. I suppose I could install Puppy and rework a ton-o-stuff in the menu to make it simple & obvious, but I sorta hate to do that...

(as an aside, Puppy screams on this thing. It has a "Designed for Windows ME" sticker on it but I seriously doubt any version of Windows EVER ran that fast on a P4.)

[oz]

Zenwalk might work well on it:

www.zenwalk.org - Ever tried zen computing?

[ephonk]

Dang! I've never even heard of Zenwalk.

I'll sure as heck try that!

Thanx...

[oz]

It's based on Slackware and is usually very stable.

I used to run it and liked it a lot.

[ephonk]

The screen prints are very pretty and clean.

I'm downloading & burning a CD now....

[ephonk]

Damn... that wouldn't fly either.

That's a damn shame, cos' I really liked Zenwalk when I tried it on one of my own boxes. A very crisp distro.

[oz]

You can find some other lightweights mentioned here, but Puppy and Damn Small are probably the lightest:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/cof...re-2009-a.html

...for something lighter, you can take a look here:

Mini Linux - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Slax might work.

[computerophil]

So the "what distro is best for me" has been done to death, I'm sure... but I have a somewhat different wrinkle.

I was recovering an XP machine for a friend - it had been stolen and when they got it back they found that "it has a password on it now!" Well, actually, it had been flattened and reloaded with an illegal copy of XP. So I figured this was a great opportunity to introduce them to Linux.

I soon found that the machine is too feeble to run the noob-friendly distros I'd usually plop down on it. Xubuntu is too heavy for it. Puppy rocks like a maniac on it, but it's not really noob-friendly. I just know they'd open a menu and be completely turned off by what they saw there, recycle the machine and buy a new Vista box.

So there's the thing: I need a grandma-friendly distro that can run on older hardware, in this case a Sony Vaio P4. I have yet to see such a thing. Puppy comes really close. I suppose I could install Puppy and rework a ton-o-stuff in the menu to make it simple & obvious, but I sorta hate to do that...

(as an aside, Puppy screams on this thing. It has a "Designed for Windows ME" sticker on it but I seriously doubt any version of Windows EVER ran that fast on a P4.)

It's hard for me to suggest something different than Puppy (I started with it and still it is my great love)
Did you try Knoppix - I had good expirences with it.
Also openmamba and SAM


They are all liveCDs so you can try them out before installing

[coopstah13]

If you start out with something like a debian net install you can install just the things you want and keep things pretty lightweight. I have installed ubuntu on machine with 64m memory with no problem (server install cd, install X11 and fvwm-crystal WM), though I haven't read what your mem specs are. Arch net install will allow you to create a pretty light distro, I am running gnome on my laptop with a torrent client, firefox, pidgin, thunderbird open and its < 256m memory, so I imagine if you install something lighter it would be even better.