Which Linux Distro For An Old Laptop
 

Well the title just about sums it up.

I only use my old laptop for internet access and it is painfully slow. It is a Celeron 500Mhz od the Pentium 2 era. It has 256Mb ram IIRC.

What would be the best distro for it, I am after something basic only for internet use. It needs to be one that will run ok on my slow laptop.

Re: Which Linux Distro For An Old Laptop
 

you may as well of put it F.A.O Entwisi linux guru, he'll be only one who will know :D

Re: Which Linux Distro For An Old Laptop
 

you can use pretty much any distro(Mandriva, Knoppix, Suse, Fedora, etc), what you should do is avoid window managers like Gnome and KDE(you can install the libraries so you can use their native programs just don't use them) , use something like IceWM. Make sure you don't install any services that you don't need or at very least make sure they aren't started by default. think down to a level of do I even need sound? Likewise, what browser? if its just for basic browsing then dillo absolutely flies but its rather basic :D Firefox or Opera or Galeon or Epiphany give you the full feature treatment.

happy to talk you through optimisation if you like.

Re: Which Linux Distro For An Old Laptop
 

I have downloaded Ubuntu 6.10 but I might try a Knoppix live cd first, and see what the speed difference is like compared to the Windows XP that is on it at the moment.

Re: Which Linux Distro For An Old Laptop
 

that not really a fair comparison, comparing one running from a slow CDROM, the other from a HD.

Install it dual boot if there is space. I'm not a fan of (K)Ubuntu tbh, they mess with standard stuff too much for my liking.

Re: Which Linux Distro For An Old Laptop
 

With that spec of laptop I would recommend xubuntu rather than ubuntu. It uses a different window manager which uses much less resources so it should run faster.

But good choice, Ubuntu is a great distro, I use it on all my systems and have done for some time.

Re: Which Linux Distro For An Old Laptop
 

nah, its rubbish! I managed to put up with it for about 4 weeks before it drove me crazy.

Gentoo rocks for modern machines :D

Mandriva(mainly as its all binaries) for old stuff.