Hi, total Linux newbie here. As you can see from the subject I'm looking for suggestions as to which Linux distro might be suitable for a Pentium 4-era laptop.

Specs: Fujitsu Siemens Amilo D7800 - P4 (2.4GHz), 1GB RAM, noisy old 40GB HD with about 10GB free to install as a dual-boot configuration with XP.

One issue might be the wireless network adapter. It's a PCMCIA/PC Card Belkin (label says F5D7010 - Ver.7000uk) I think it *may* contain a Ralink RT2500 but I'm not 100% on that.
This card has given me trouble under Windows so I'm not too hopeful for it being plain sailing under Linux. :P

Any pointers would be appreciated. I'm not a computer newbie but I've never really given Linux a proper try before. This old machine seems a good place to start.

Thanks for your time,
Yoss

I found two links suggesting you can make your Belkin card work using ndiswrapper. Here are the links.

-->http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-inst...on-fiesty.html

-->http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...478/page2.html

There are different ways to get wireless cards to work. The best is a native linux driver. If one can not be found, then ndiswrapper allows you to use a windows driver, ndiswrapper provides an interface between the incompatible windows code, and linux. It works on lots of cards.

I run Slackware on a similar vintage desktop, its a P4 at 2.0 Ghz. It works well enough for an XP vintage system. You have enough ram, the disk space might be a little tight for a larger distro. Most will install, but you won't have much space left over for user files.

If you plan on keeping XP, you will have to shrink the XP's partition, and create a new one for linux.

Things you might consider, buy a new drive, and swap out the old one. You will find it difficult to find a 40 gig drive these days. There should be lots of larger drives that will do the trick. Then you could have the entire drive for linux.

If you have to have XP, then re-partitioning is the best solution on the old drive.

You could also install v-box, and install linux as a virtual machine. This does not require re-partitioning. You install v-box for XP, and linux becomes the guest system. You will need a 10 gig partition for a useable system.

As for the "Which distro" question, this link might help.

-->http://www.tuxradar.com/content/how-...t-linux-distro

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the reply! The wireless driver links look interesting - I'll check them out properly once I've posted this.
As to the question of distros, I downloaded Lubuntu and had a quick mess around with it as a live CD. Seems nice enough and fairly quick, even running from a CD.

My requirements aren't very high. The machine just needs to be able to run a modern browser at a reasonable speed. Also, not dropping the wireless connection or freezing completely for a couple of seconds every few minutes would be good. It would put it ahead of the installed copy of XP anyway!

Also, I've managed to make more space on the HD so there's around 14GB free now. As for user files, well I really don't want to throw any money at this thing at the moment so a new HD is out but I can just put a large USB stick in for local storage and grab other files off my main desktop PC over wireless.