distro for old pavilion laptop

wrathkeg · 01-08-2008, 04:34 AM

Hi. I am trying to install a linux distro on an old HP Pavilion N5440 alongside Windows XP. Does anyone know for sure of a recent distro which will install on this laptop? (or have experience of installing a distro on something similar). I have tried some recent Ubuntus, but they don't install, and I don't really have time to sort out why: I would rather use a different distro if it would work 'out of the box'.
TIA
WK

pljvaldez · 01-08-2008, 08:51 PM

Here's a link of some archived install reviews on that laptop. I just glanced at one of them and it looks like they used an old version of Mandrake. So I would try Mandriva or PCLinux OS.

How much RAM is in the machine? That may prohibit a full install of either of those. For old machines, I typically use Debian and install a base install (command line only) then apt-get install X, a lightweight window manager (like XFCE, Icewm, etc), and lightweight applications...