Many years ago Adam introduced me to Debian, but while its much easier to install these days its not really ready for my mum and other non teck savvy users, so I should recommend ubuntu, and then replacing gnome desktop with icewm to reduce the load.
Good luck, Linux is fun but a little background reading about operating systems will help loads. I recommend reading a little book called gate networks and operating systems by Andrew talenbaum as it will help you know a little OS theory (Bias toward UNIX derivatives) while introducing you to most of what makes a computer run in clear English.
I would recommend Debian but ubuntu auto detects most hardware and for a newbie the things that make me think ubuntu is evil will not be found by you before you change Linux distro anyway
Regards
Owen
PS I work full time with redhat derivatives which benifit from a transactional package manager over debian's non transactional package management. Ubuntu is like debian but without such strict packaging.
On Tue, 25 Apr 2006 11:02:17 +0100 Simon Royal s.royal@totalise.co.uk wrote:
After weeks of trying to find a ThinkPad to use for Linux and having no joy I have won five in the last week - a 770, 755CX, 380ED, 380ED & 760XL.
I have decided to keep the two 380EDs and resell the rest.
One of them is for my wife so she can wirelessly surf while watching TV, but she is not interested in Linux and will be running Windows 98SE or 2000.
Bearing in mind the age of the machine, what's the best distro to use for a Linux newbie?
I don't want to dual boot or to run anything too heavy on it. I want it for wireless surfing, emails, light word processing and expanding my knowledge of Linux. I know it is old, but I would like it to run pretty smoothly.
I am fairly new to Linux and would prefer a distro with a GUI, but know that Gnome or KDE are resource hungry. I have been running Vector Linux SOHO live on my wifes PC and it seems pretty easy on resources and uses Xfce desktop manager, it also has special ThinkPad tailored settings.
I have also dabbled in DSL, Knoppix and Ubuntu - the last requiring a better machine than the 380ED.
I have an 802.11b wireless PCMCIA card which apparently works in Linux
according to the box.
So the ultimate question is, which distro will run relatively smooth, work on a 380ED, work with my wireless PCMCIA card and is pretty user friendly and configurable via GUI and not too much Linux knowledge initially.
One final question, does anyone know the max hard drive and RAM you can put into a 380ED. Kind Regards
Simon Royal
www.simonroyal.co.uk The box said requires Windows 2000 or better, so I bought an Apple Mac
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