Minimalistic Distro?

[rjay2140]

Hi, I am looking for a distro for this laptop:

P4 2.40 GHz
222 MB of RAM
32 MB of Video (IGP 340 M)

I want it to keep it in the living room to browse the web, specifically Youtube. And that's it. My young brother and my mom will be using it so something simplistic.

I have tried Xubuntu but the installation is freezing (the forward button is greyed out) and the alternate install CD is another 600 MB I have to download which I personally do not have high hopes for. I have moved onto Puppy Linux which is great... but it freezes, including the times I've tried to install web browsers. I am now downloading Peppermint OS and crossing my fingers.

In the meanwhile, does anyone have some recommendations? I just want a big Chrome icon in the middle. They click it and they get on the web. That's it

If no one responds and Peppermint fails, I plan to just go with the Xubuntu alternate install and hope the install was only a hurdle.

Thanks for reading.

[arochester]

Look at BrowserLinux

[Charles4809]

You could try Slitaz 3.0. It's a very small distro with a GUI, running in RAM, and can be installed on your system. Not sure if Chrome is in their repository, but Opera, another lightweight browser, is.
They do have a website and you could look for it on distrowatch.

[rjay2140]

Thank you guys. So far I have tried BrowserLinux a bit before I had to leave for work and it was what I wanted. The only downside is that it is based on Puppy and that means running it on CD. Question: Wouldn't a Linux installed in hard drive have better performance than a Live CD? These Live CDs are not running without hiccups as I thought they would.

I am planning to run Slitaz next when I get home. I don't mind using Opera. I just noticed Chrome ran faster than Firefox in Ubuntu, in another comp.

[arochester]

Puppy can be installed to a Hard Drive - hard-Puppy

[reed9]

Question: Wouldn't a Linux installed in hard drive have better performance than a Live CD? These Live CDs are not running without hiccups as I thought they would.

Yes and no. Some Live CDs decompress entirely into RAM. These are faster than a harddrive install. Puppy is able to do this, as is Slitaz I believe.

[rjay2140]

What I am concerned with is that since everything is in RAM, everything including unnecessary stuff will occupy what little RAM I have (222 MB) and it will not have space for it to breathe, like watching a YouTube video.

I don't understand these things well but I am trying to make some sense/explanation with what I do know.

:and thank you for the link. i found that useful.

[arochester]

Puppy is designed to run with 128Mb -http://puppylinux.org/wikka/MinReq

Perhaps the answer is to try BrowserLinux instead of hypothesising....

[reed9]

Flash can be a challenge to run on low spec machines regardless of OS. You can make a swap file or swap partition for Puppy to use, which will slow things down considering if the swap is heavily used, but can alleviate some of the memory constraints.

[MASONTX]

Use the live cd to pick a distro, then I would hard drive install your distro of choice. You should probably also look at Lubuntu, Mint LXDE, and AntiX.