I need Linux for my Compaq presario 1255. Does any one have any suggestions? Tried damn small linux down to 0.4.8. Most of them either had screen problems e.g. green with stripes across and down making data unreadable. Memory low? Display setting wrong? Any help very welcome.

ancientcomputerowner

Well, it could be the memory being too low, it could be the display driver, but since you didn't give us any info about your hardware, I'd assume you have 32MB stock soldered RAM and that is a little too little in most cases.

Still, it sounds like your Display setting is the problem here. Please post your /etc/X11/xorg.conf (or XF86Config for older distributions I guess)

You may want to give Vector Linux a shot. It is based on Slackware, is user friendly and above all else, it retains legacy drivers that might help you with older machines as well.

If you can max your memory (I think those machines goes up to 128?), you may get still some performance using some light-weight window managers like black/flux/openbox.

If you search this forum, you will notice that a pretty common issue with those laptops are the sound drivers. Some of those threads also have tutorials and links that might help you. Search for that =).

Probably graphics driver problems. Here's some info, but that's from 2004 (from what I see you should be able to do the same with modern distros):
http://web.archive.org/web/200404050...chines/cp1255/