I'm trying to help my friend with his computer. It is a gateway system with a P3 ~750mHz processor and 64 MB ram. He tried adding additional RAM to it a few years ago, however his system wouldn't accept it.

Windows Me is giving him problems, so I convinced him to try a linux installation [at least until he buys a new computer, whenever that might be].


I'm thinking of installing Knoppix or possibly Ubuntu for him (as a dual boot within the 7 GB of free space he has remaining - after re-sizing his old partition of course), however his system does not have sufficient RAM to boot a graphical liveCD. I can probably use text-mode to launch the installer for Knoppix, however any suggestions on other distributions that may work better for him?

I am assuming that his system should be sufficient to run Gnome or KDE with minimal eye-candy from a HD install given a large enough swap partition.


Thanks

I would probably go for Xubuntu or Damn Small Linux for 64MB RAM. My most minimal Debian KDE desktop (an old Celeron 400MHz) took up 60MB just to run kdebase and no extra services.

I would actually try doing the RAM again. Just don't be cheap and get the exact kind of ram the machine uses from http://www.memoryx.net/gatewaymemory.html or http://www.crucial.com/ (I think crucial guarantees the memory if you select your computer and it doesn't work).

Ditto trying again with more RAM. I have a PIII with 320MB RAM and it runs various Linux distros very nicely. Something of this nature typically uses PC133 RAM, which is pretty cheap.