problem with suse 10.1 graphical environment

[golnaz]

hi all friends
I'm migrating from win xp to linux now.
I installed suse 10.1 successfully, but after about 2-3 min working with KDE, the system would hang up and i had to restart.
even I tried FWMV desktop, it also had this problem, but it would happen after a longer time ,for example, 10 mins, or after executing a graphical application, like YAST.
my computer have:
main board: MSI M266 A AGP-DDR-SDR-533
RAM: 256 MB DDR V.DATA
VGA : S3 Graphics ProSavage DDR (ONBOARD)
cpu: 2400 mhz intel

if I should change the vga card or add RAM, can you help me what to buy to be suitable for my system and linux?

[Xaleandr]

Hello, golnaz

It seems the problem is really with a lack of memory (on my laptop SuSe requires ~300 MB).
I have a few questions to You:
1) Do You have swap and how is it configured ???
2) In SuSe 10.1 there is a number of "resource-hungry" processes which are switched on by default and may be safely switched off (especially on legacy systems), for example:
a) beagle
b) ZMD installer/updater

Though I think 256 Mb is really not sufficient, You will have problems running other applications (e.g OpenOffice)

[golnaz]

for the first 2-3 times that this problem occurred, I installed Linux again and each time I increased the space of swap, now it's 1 GB.
now I have the Ubuntu 7.04 disk and want to install it instead of Suse. does Ubuntu have such "hungry processes" ? how can I switch them off before I enter the graphical environment?
do you think a 512 MB RAM is sufficient to add to this 256 MB?
thanks a lot.

[smolloy]

You should be able to run either of these distros on your system. They might run slowly, but they will run. You just have to put a bit of care into the installation, and make sure that any processes you don't need are turned off.

You'll probably have better luck with Ubuntu than Suse, as I don't think it's as memory hungry by default.