Ubuntu vs. Fedora

[Cityscape]

Hi, I am new to linux, although I am an advanced computer user. Have have a computer from 2001 with: 700 Mhz Celeron CPU, 640 MB RAM (gonna up it to 1GB soon), 64 MB graphics, 30 GB hard drive.

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on this computer, but it runs slow. It's not unusable but slow. I was wondering in Fedora would run faster? I know it has lower system requirements but would it run faster on this older hardware? Also any other full distro suggestions would be welcome.

Thanks

[GNU-Fan]

Hi,

most probably it won't run any faster.
What's so slow is the desktop environment (Gnome or KDE) and this does not differ much between Fedora and Ubuntu.

There are smaller desktop environments, like XFCE or LXDE. Both of which can be installed on Ubuntu as well as on Fedora.

[Cityscape]

I've tried both LXDE and XFCE. XFCE is the faster of the two.

But even XFCE runs slow. Why?

[GNU-Fan]

Insufficient performance of the driver, I suppose.
Like the video driver is not accelerated or so.

Anyway, you may want to use Puppy-Linux or DamnSmallLinux.

[coopstah13]

most likely you haven't installed the correct graphics driver, which is 99% of the time what causes new users to perceive "slowness" of the distro

you should be able to run ubuntu or fedora with this machine since you have plenty of memory

what is your graphics card? run this code in a terminal and post back

lspci | grep -i vga