Advice for a friend

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)?

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

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

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Originally Posted by linkinp4rk410

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)?

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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.

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.

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

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.