Which linux would go best on....

[Arkhan]

A NEC VersaPro VA10J


It is a Japanese laptop w/ 256mb RAM, 1.00 ghz, and 20gb HD.

I tried Fedora and Zenwalk, both sucked.

Fedora ran too slow and Zenwalk was all goony

[Dapper Dan]

You might try installing XP but I think you'll feel in "sucks" when it comes to speed on your hardware as well... Given your laptop's limited resources, I'd install Damn Small Linux.

[reed9]

What do you mean by goony?

You could also try Antix or Puppy Linux.

[Arkhan]

It has XP on it but I was planning to wipe it out and put XP back on it and thought "hey why not stick linux on again"


XP runs fine on it, so I dont know why Fedora sucked so much. It just ran slow. I don't know if it was GNOME or what, but it was bogged down alot.


As for zenwalk being goony, there were just a handful of things that kept going wrong and some were unanswered bugs at their forums.... and then X11 crashed horribly after installing a themepack from their package manager.... so I zenwalked away from zenwalk, lol

[coopstah13]

Debian would be a good choice I think, you could start with a net install and then build up from there, installing only lightweight things

[reed9]

I believe the suggested system requirements for Fedora are 512 MB ram. Neither GNOME or KDE environments are going to work well with only 256 MB. Some XFCE distros might work reasonably well, otherwise, I'd try either LXDE, or a standalone window manager, like fluxbox or openbox.

[Arkhan]

Debian would be a good choice I think, you could start with a net install and then build up from there, installing only lightweight things

This was suggested by someone else as well, and it looks like I may try that.

[Daisuke_Aramaki]

i have some very old machines, which run crux, and lunar quite happily. have you looked up kmandla's blog. his hobby is getting old laptops, and running linux on them. its a fantastic site where he posts his experiences. they are extremely useful. since i cannot post a website link, due to the post count issue, you can probably get the website link in google, by just searching gor kmandla. also since he is in japan, and he has tested a lot of japanese hardware, it will be the place where i would first check.

[Arkhan]

i have some very old machines, which run crux, and lunar quite happily. have you looked up kmandla's blog. his hobby is getting old laptops, and running linux on them. its a fantastic site where he posts his experiences. they are extremely useful. since i cannot post a website link, due to the post count issue, you can probably get the website link in google, by just searching gor kmandla. also since he is in japan, and he has tested a lot of japanese hardware, it will be the place where i would first check.

I tried Lunar on it and didn't enjoy it so much...

I will definitely check out that site though, since this is indeed a Japanese laptop.


I saw TurboLinux, but it now costs money?

[reed9]

I'm quite sure there is nothing Tubolinux has that another free (gratis) distro does not. What's more, I looked on the site, and their desktop distribution lists end of life as Nov. 16th, 2007, so I'm not sure this is even an active project. Also, because of it's age and older kernel, hardware support is likely to be worse than a more modern, newer distro.

Debian is a great project, but because they are stricter than many other distro regarding non-free (as in speech) software, it is often necessary to install some drivers, especially, wireless, separately.

You might also look at Dreamlinux a Debian based distro, which lists system requirements of 128 MB ram for the XFCE version.