I've been trying to install linux on a Fujistu-Siemens Amilo-A laptop (40GB HD, mobile AMD Athlon 2000+, 1.66 GHz, 224 Mb RAM) which is about 4 years old now. The computer belongs to a friend of mine who would be interested in knowing more about Linux and trying it out.

I've extended the Windows partition (this might have been a mistake) because it has been running rather slowly these past few months, so there is about 30Mb for Windows and 10Mb available for a Linux distro (dual boot setup).

I've tried installing Ubuntu from the Live CD, which is also the installation CD. I can't get past the first step, in other words, I never see the actual desktop nor hear that music that plays just beforehand. The CD does boot, but you get a blank dark screen forever at some point and nothing else happens - I've tried several times. The CD works on my other machines.

I then thought I'd try seeing if the KNOPPIX Live CD would work on the machine. Nope! Similar result. I can't get past a few lines of the boot process (on screen description / details).

So I'd like to install any Linux distro except Fedora (I like Fedora, but would like to try something new) which is available in Italian, and which doesn't need a lot of RAM nor a lot of memory (224 Mb RAM & approx. 10Gb of HD space available). Perhaps a no nonsense distro without any bells and whistles, however with a user-friendly GUI nevertheless so as not to turn off someone who will be completely new to Linux. And NOT a live version, or, in any case, I'd like to install it on the HD. Damn Small Linux? The problem is that I'm not all that familiar with the different distros available.

What I really need here is some good advice from anyone with quite a bit of experience and hands-on experience with lots of ditros.

Many thanks.

P.S. - Oh yeah, and I'd like a distro that will be supported for some time to come (2 or 3 years, if possible)

I suggest you start here: http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/fujitsu.html and see how other people have installed Linux on that Laptop..

You'll find little tidbits like this one from a Ubuntu HOW-TO to get you rolling..
Debian Etch runs great on my Dell laptop.. and you just know Debian will be supported for a good 3-5 years..

farslayer,

Many thanks for your reply and for the excellent link.

I found this: http://www.linuxforums.org/desktop/a...ld_laptop.html. I just happened to come across it without looking for it. It was really strange! An excellent site.

According to this site, Zenwalk and Slax seem to be good choices for me, however Zenwalk is not available in Italian. I'm going to look into Slax and also to see if Xfce can be installed in Italian even though Zenwalk itself is not available in Italian. I imagine Debian would be much too voluminous for my setup. I don't even have 256Mb of RAM! What do you think?

I've installed w/ 56 & 128mb of ram. But it's always been the old versions of Red Hat.
Since you want to try something else I really think any of them would work for you, even Debian. Very curious that Ubuntu does not start right up as it is normally pretty goof proof from my experience.
Slack would be a good one also, and probably what I would go with if I couldn't use RH.
Good luck.

Well my Laptop is a 1.3 Ghz Intel CPU, with 256 MB of RAM with a 30 GB Hard drive and is about 5-6 years old, and Debian runs beautifully on it. The hardware you are referring to while it won't run Windows Vista, will run most current Linux distributions very well.

Case in point, I recently installed Debian etch on a Pentium 133 MMX system with 32 MB RAM and a 1 MB video card.. Of course I had to use a lightweight desktop and not gnome or KDE and the system still wasn't real quick but worked perfectly well for browsing the web or typing a letter. It was a "lets see what we can do on this hardware' type of project, and speaks volumes for the flexibility of Linux distributions.

Actually I think your Laptop would run any of the main distros (Debian Etch, Fedora Core, Ubuntu, Suse, Slackware) reasonably well.. going to zenwalk or slax while they would absolutely fly on that system might be a bit more of a lightweight distro than you truly could run on that system.

First I would go here & see what other users have done with your model laptop:

http://www.linux-laptop.net/
http://www.tuxmobil.org/

as for the distros try these:

Vector Linux
http://www.vectorlinux.com/

DSL
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Puppy Linux
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=3

Slackware
http://www.slackware.com/

SLAX Live CD
http://www.slax.org/

BeaFanatIX
http://bea.cabarel.com/

Elive:
http://www.elivecd.org/

Deli
http://delili.lens.hl-users.com/

Luit Linux
http://luitlinux.sarovar.org/