Having serious issues choosing distro for my system

[bunnyman]

I have an older Compaq Presario with an 80GB Hard drive, 256MB RAM, and a 2.5GHZ Intel Processor.

I tried Ubuntu and it was pretty sluggish. I tried Tiny core and it was a little too tiny. I ran Fedora 7 from a CD just to try and retrieve some files from windows and it was okay. I have Opensuse 11.1 on my laptop and love it but I think it might be a little too complicated for this machine. I am currently running Puppy and I like it but am going to have to change again (at least to a different version of puppy) because it will not mount flash drives or my optical drive.

I just want a simple distro which will run relatively fast on my machine and have minimal issues with using a wireless usb dongle.


I really have no idea which distros will run well on this computer so I have been sticking to the tiny ones.

Any suggestions would be appriciated.

[coopstah13]

you could try xubuntu, it is based of xfce so it should be lighter than regular ubuntu, you might have to strip it down some though

[bigvoo]

I second xubuntu, I just installed it on a friends old laptop with 256 ram and it works great.. i used to use it with my old laptop, with only 128 ram, but the newer versions just won't quite do 128.

[reed9]

I've just been looking at the newly release Linux Mint Fluxbox edition, and it's very good. On my system, the baseline memory usage was around 100MB, so it should work fine with only 256MB RAM.

If Xubuntu is still too heavy for you, I would recommend giving Mint Fluxbox a whirl.

The Linux Mint Blog Blog Archive Linux Mint 8 Fluxbox released!