Advice for a friend

[Muser]

One of my friends is thinking of switching to Linux on his 7 year old VIAO, so you can imagine the hardware is also pretty old. I suggested Yoper and VectorLinux if he wanted to get a lot of speed on his machine, but he was questioning with it would be a big difference between a major and easy distro, i.e. Mandrake, and Yoper/VectorLinux speedwise. He is interested in Mandrake because of the easy of use, but I also think speed needs to as much a concern. Basically is there a distro present that has great speed and easy of use (installer doesn't have to be easy, I'm gonna help him there)?

[Chris H]

If hd capacity isnī t a problem then use any distro but choose a window/desktop manager that isnīt as memory hungry as the latest KDE or Gnome.

I had a pc running VectorLinux with XFCE quite happily. 266MHz / 64Mb IIRC.

[michux]

One of my friends is thinking of switching to Linux on his 7 year old VIAO, so you can imagine the hardware is also pretty old. I suggested Yoper and VectorLinux if he wanted to get a lot of speed on his machine, but he was questioning with it would be a big difference between a major and easy distro, i.e. Mandrake, and Yoper/VectorLinux speedwise. He is interested in Mandrake because of the easy of use, but I also think speed needs to as much a concern. Basically is there a distro present that has great speed and easy of use (installer doesn't have to be easy, I'm gonna help him there)?

Well basically any distro is easy to use when it's configured properly.
I installed debian sarge on my dad's firm main PC and it works great for over half year now. 3 users, all pretty satiflied after a change from a non-stop crashing windows xp.

The question is rather - what are the exact parameters of the machine? Yoper would be allright, but if it's at least pentium 3 500 Mhz, 128 MB of RAM. If it's older, I would go for something more customizable, like debian or slackware maybe.

[minty95]

I've got Mandrake 9.2 going on a 5 year old compaq presario laptop with a 400MHz K6-2 and 160MB RAM and it runs at an acceptable speed using KDE. I also tried Fedora Core 1 on the same machine which seemed slightly quicker.

[jeremy1701]

I run MDK 10.1 on a Compaq Presario, 500 MHz PII. It's ssssllllooooowwwww running KDE. I also dual boot Ubuntu 4.1 on this box, running Gnome. There is a significant difference in speed.

Jeremy

[tom boucher]

I also got Mandrake 10.1 running on an old 1998 Compaq hog. Appears to run fine with KDE 3.2. My only issue that I am working on is sound.