Hello all,

I know there are other posts for newbies and their laptops asking which distro to use, but I have a longtime favorite 385XD (P1 MMX 233mhz, 96 MB ram) I would like to upgrade to Linux. I've been using Win 98 but it's developed some problems and I don't see re-installing it.

Can someone suggest a good distro for this machine? Network is through a PC Card 3com card. I just want to websurf, email, and write with it.

Thanks in advance,
Derek

VectorLinux will perform well on a machine of that calliber.
You will have to overcome your newbness, however.

lol sasho

Thanks for your replies. I see the caliber and tenor of the kind of help I can expect is the same as when I tried this a year or so ago.

slackware or vector (slackware based) would be good candidates for an older PC with low RAM. Window managers like XFCE, Fluxbox or ICEwm have less bloat then Gnome or KDE and will run better.

You can search www.distrowatch.com for an idea of other distros.

I have an old hp n3210, 433 mhz, 256 meg memory. I have ran suse 9.3 and upgraded to 10, runs great once booted up, but does take a rather long time to boot, no big deal to me but it may be a drawback to some. I have recently put another drive in this laptop and have installed slackware 10.2, I had some issues with lan and wireless, but got them worked out with help from this forum. There isnt any doubt at all that this old unit runs much faster on slackware than it does on suse. I will admit that it wasn't quite as easy as installing suse or mandrake, but I look at it as a learning process anyway. If you dont mind spending a little time with it installing slackware should work for you, your laptop isnt that much older than mine and I wouldn't be surprised if it didnt work out for you.