Hi
I am looking at different distros. I need high hardware compatibility, ease of use for newbies plus reasonable speed out of dated hardware.
I have yet to find a laptop, but have been looking at anything from Pentium 2 300Mhz upwards.
Ubuntu I have tinkered with Ubuntu 5.10 live cd on a G3 iBook 500Mhz with 386MB ram and an AMD 1.3Ghz desktop with 768MB RAM and both were ok speed wise. I know an install would speed things up anyway.
OpenSUSE I have heard good things about OpenSUSE but I don't know how power hungry it is.
Vector Linux Finally I was looking at Vector Linux as it is aimed to run comfortably with only 32MB RAM and under a 1gig install space, but I don't know anyone who has used it.
If you could help point in the right direction for a low specced distro that runs on a laptop and is usuable on a daily basis without having to delve to much into the Linux underbelly just to get things going.
Kind Regards
Simon Royal
---- www.simonroyal.co.uk The box said requires Windows 2000 or better, so I bought an Apple Mac
Simon Royal wrote:
Hi
I am looking at different distros. I need high hardware compatibility, ease of use for newbies plus reasonable speed out of dated hardware.
I have yet to find a laptop, but have been looking at anything from Pentium 2 300Mhz upwards.
The problem with the major distros you mentioned is their preferenece for Gnome and KDE desktops which are too CPU and memory hungry for an old system.
I use Zenwalk, a Slackware based distro, that is fast and light (xfce desktop) onmy two old PCs. Wokrs fine.
Ian
Speaking from a purely Ubuntu perspective. You may want to wait until Dapper becomes stable (1st June), as the Gnome and Ubuntu developers have done a great job speeding things up, and reducing memory usage. It's noticeable, even on a amd64 machine.
You may also want to consider XUbuntu, which is a lightweight version of the distro which runs xfce. Or maybe something like DSL...
On Fri, 2006-04-07 at 14:32 +0100, Simon Royal wrote:
Hi
I am looking at different distros. I need high hardware compatibility, ease of use for newbies plus reasonable speed out of dated hardware.
It is my experience that the heavyweight distro's are generally better suited to newbies...With the caveat that they won't learn as much using them.
Suse in particular is very very newbie friendly..it is possible to administer a Suse machine without ever having to drop to a shell prompt...However learning how to administer Linux via YaST will do nothing to prepare you for administering any other Linux machine.
Both Gnome and KDE (default for Ubuntu and Suse respectively) are quite resource heavy...you will find the going quite slow on anything less than 500 Mhz and 256MB Ram. Nothing is stopping you from running a more lightweight window manager on either Ubuntu or Suse..but in doing so you lose some of the "niceness" of either of those distro's.
On a level playing field I would say that ubuntu is perhaps very slightly less resource hungry than Suse...but if there is a difference there then it is very small.
Lightweight distros such as Vector or DSL will give you far better performance on limited hardware..but you may find the learning curve slightly steeper
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Ian bell -
Richard Brooklyn -
Simon Royal -
Wayne Stallwood