Hello, all, heads up- rather long question here!

My step father has this old computer (Pentium III, 256 or 512MB RAM) that's been sitting in his old office for a decade that he asked me to get back up and running for him. He stopped using it a long time ago because his son has a nicer (newer) computer in another room that the both of them have used for the past ~6 years. His son is now moving out, bringing the newer computer with him, so my stepfather would like to use the old one. Because of the age of the machine and because he is EXTREMELY computer illiterate, I would first think to just update it from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, but because that has been end-of-lifed as well, I would like to use a Linux distro. I personally have come to love the lightweight-ness (and complexity) of Arch Linux, but that is hardly the distro for a non-technical person.

This user literally goes to 8 websites, including Comcast.net for his email. He has no need for office software, or to install any other software. He only needs flash/other web video codecs to play some clips of races (they are usually 240 or 320p video, so the computer should be able to play them fairly well).

Any recommendations for a distro for such a user? I currently tried installing Arch Linux with Chromium, which seems to work pretty well aside from the fact that I cannot get the audio to maintain the settings from the last boot (every bootup, the audio is muted and the "master" slider seems to only control the bass volume, I must use the PCM slider to actually adjust the volume, requiring going into the xfce settings and changing which slider the taskbar uses and then unmuting it) and that I cannot get this Linksys USB wireless card to work.

Alright, enough background; as for my question:
Should I try to get Arch Linux working or should I switch to a distro that I am much more familiary with, Debian? I thought Arch would be better because there are less convenience features running in the background, especially because the computer will not be running anything other than Chromium. Should I consider ChromeOS? Should I just put XP on the machine because this guy is used to Windows (but because he's only ever going to be opening the Internet application, anyway, there shouldn't be much of a difference from his point of view)?

I feel I may have wasted my time trying to figure things out on Arch Linux, and I would prefer to not install Debian, check its performance, then ChromeOS, then Knoppix/Puppy/DSL until I find one. I thought it would be easier to ask the great all-knowing community for opinions (not necessarily looking for hard numbers, just people's experiences). Any input is welcome!

Thanks, guys!

Hello
First of all stop worrying about background processes since in any distro you can turn off what you don't need nor use. Only windows tries to have everything ready "just in case". Since you're familiar with Debian but probably don't want to saddle him with Stable or Testing, I recommend either Mint or SolydXK. My personal preference for such a hand-holding user-friendly distro is SolydXK. Whether his PC is 256MB or 512MB is a pretty big difference and you'd be best off to max that out, but these will run. The graphics card/chip is likely more important for the following reason. SolydXK comes in 3 versions, one of which is Enterprise so of no concern here, but the other 2 are a choice between the fairly lightweight Xfce and the fully-featured (and more friendly to windows migrators) KDE. My guess is he would take to KDE right away but could be taught Xfce in an afternoon with a few follow ups.

FWIW I have a Sony Vaio Laptop w/ a P3 - 400MHz CPU, 256MB ram, and a crap NeoMagix graphics chip. It takes a long time (to me) to boot but once up it is not too painful.

That said, if his PC is not some proprietary Dell (non standard power supply) you can replace the mobo, ram, graphics, drives for well under $300, and run anything you want really fast and fun. This can be either new or really good shape used as escalating hardware requirements have made windows users "upgrade". Example - Core 2 Pentium Lenovo Thinkpad laptops w/ ~2GB ram are all over eBay for $100 US.

There won't be much performance differences between Debian and Arch on such a computer, just go with Debian, possibly with the LXDE desktop if the machine is low on RAM and the user is used to Windows 2000/XP. Just go for a minimal install, add LXDE (or a different lightweight environment) and the browser of your choice on top of it. Keep in mind that modern browsers like Firefox and Chrome/Chromium are RAM hogs, so you might try something more lightweight, like Midori.

Hi. You can start with a netinst CD for Debian and then use Apt or it's GUI'ish Aptitude to add a light environment++ like *box, etc... even add Debian's DVDs or Bly-ray for offline respiratory with:best wishes and have fun.

I'd recommend Mint Debian Edition as well. It looks nice and it has a start menu which resembles XP.

Don't worry about "complicated" distro's. It might be complicated to set up, but not to use. So as soon as you left the house no administrative tasks are to be performed anyway.

A little more memory would be nice though. Memory this old you usually find in discarded computers or on scrapyards. People don't know what they throw away.

Processor power is not an issue. I have run Gnome and KDE3 on a 600 MHz Celeron.

jlinkels

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Hi, enorbet. I'm not familiar with SolydXK, I'll check it out, and as for stopping unnecessary background processes, I only meant that when it comes to Arch, those processes are by default disabled, which I feel presents a better system baseline, where in Debian, many of these processes are enabled by default. I am familiar with Debian, but not to the point that I know what init.d scripts I can disable without unwanted side-effects.

As for the upgrades- I would probably jump on a low-power ready-made system on eBay for ~$100 before I get new parts for this kind of user, RAM may be worth checking into, though; I'll keep that in mind.

I might end up just installing Debian, because it has been my experience that it runs very well. Probably going to look into some of these other distros that are new to me, as well (testing on my more capable box in a VM, though, to save time).

Thanks, jamison. Luckily, he does have a nice, hi-speed connection, so the DVD copies of the distro shouldn't be necessary. Just a matter of getting this USB WiFi card working for the purpose of viewing the websites. Thanks, though!

Cool, the netinst is like Arch or Slackware in that it starts out CLI and assumes nothing about what you may want.

What choice you make will effect how much you will or won't be available for fixit calls, but not have much effect on how it runs, since they all obviously have essentially the same kernel, unless you custom build one.

You probably should choose Debian if you intend to provide all the "tech support". The reason I mentioned Mint, but especially SolydXK, is that they are Debian based.

SolydXK comes with a few default basics that are excellent for beginners and also for Debian Pros. It has Debian repositories available by default but even that is not required since, rather than being a bleeding edge rolling release, it is a semi rolling release having Official quarterly updates. The default greeter in X has 4 tabs, one for the SolydXK community, and one for 3rd Party Hardware drivers, for example. It also has Steam, PlayOnLinux and Wine installed by default so many windows apps that your Dad just can't part with are likely to run without a lot of legwork on your part.

Though I never thought I'd say this; I'd probably dump Arch for Slack.

If he wants to play media, you should definitely try to get more RAM, ideally as much as you can fit into that thing. If you can determine the manufacturer of the motherboard, there's a good chance you will be able to find the RAM specs at the manufacturer's website.

I had a P3 that ran quite nicely with Slackware v. 12 up until the day it died and went to the great recycling bin in the sky, but the chip would struggle with video. (I can't remember how much RAM it had.)

Debian 486 kernel minimal install with Fluxbox, or if you must have a DE a minimal LXDE, MATE, or XFCE, on such a machine. Anything bigger, such as LMDE which is no lightweight, will slow it down. RAM isn't the problem you might think it would be with lightweight DEs or WMs but processor power will be.

Why? A Pentium 3 will work perfectly fine with a i686 kernel.