I would like to buy a 2nd netbook and then replace the os already existing there by debian from usb flash drive. I'ld prefer a light machine for my home using it for gmail facebook and latex editing and occasional youtube streaming. Would you kindly suggest any particular machine? I made some cursory google search and thought of Asus X200MA 2GB/500GB HDD/DOS. What about it?

prudra,

The Asus X200MA seems to look okay with regard to Linux compatibility.

You could consider using the lightweight, Debian-based antiX-16.1 instead of Debian.

antiX is specifically designed for low-powered machines such as netbooks and older hardware.

Despite the 2GB of RAM, the X200's CPU is a weak point.

http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

http://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/...FAQ/index.html

To enable wifi after installation:

Menu > Control Centre > Network > Network Interfaces (ceni) > wlan0 > follow wizard and give SSID/network name and wifi password.

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If you can find one inexpensive, the Lenovo Yoga 700 11" works exceedingly well with linux. Intel everything, so other than the accelerometer (which I never tried to get to work because I don't like them) everything worked out of the box. The touchpad was actually really nice, the 1080P 11" screen looked fantastic as long as you weren't in bright light. The keyboard felt ok, but the keys were a little too small for me and I made a lot of mistakes when attempting to use it, so that ultimately made me decide to get rid of it and replace it with something a bit bigger, but other than that, it was a great device (and my wife still likes it as she replaced her Dell 2-in-1 with it).

Good part of this story is you are getting it new and you have a bit of time to test.

Pretty much I suspect that if you can load some form of dos/freedos on it, you have a good chance to install linux.

I picked up a Lenovo Flex 3 11" and every distro I threw at it ran fine out of the box. Runs Debian fine, whether I use GNOME 3 or OpenBox (although the former being resource fungry being slightly sluggish at times but not unusable).

Does that one have touch-screen? Working good?

It has a touch screen, and everything works good.

ASUS would be the top choice. After that I would say Acer as I have MX-16 running on my Acer laptop. I would stay away from Lenovo because they have a rootkit installed on the motherboard that reports everything home. If you want it easy, go with MX-16 which is Debian based on Debian stable. https://mxlinux.org/

@jefro: the machine comes from amazon.in with free dos installed.bi think i'll play with that for a few days just to remind me of those old days of dir, mcopy -t, del, edlin etc.

You can always 'play' with dos under dosbox in Linux.

I've used the old asus eeepc's and a dell netbook.

currently have a Dell Latitude 2100 that my daughter was using until it got the windows 10 virus and was too slow to use after.

I think, I owe a feedback to my forum mates. Amazon.in offered a Dell Vostro 15 3558 2GB/Ubuntu/500HDD laptop at almost the same price and I could not resist the temptation. I remembered that once in some other forum I read as an answer to the same question from some one `if you can afford go for a Dell machine'. This machine came with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. I later installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, after disabling secure boot. Thanks for all the suggestions.

Hello... beachboy2 suggests the antiX distribution which is up to version 16, and I concur. It works fine, even on older Dell Latitude netbooks (models 2110 and 2120) which have a Broadcom wifi interface that is a little tricky to get working with mainstream Debian. For some reason, antiX has no problem with it. The touchpad and everything else are fine as well.

You will need to make a bootable USB stick with the antiX iso file on it. If you are like me, you may have forgotten how to do that. So here's a refresher.

HOW TO MAKE A BOOTABLE USB INSTALLATION

1. On any Linux PC, download the antiX ISO file from one of the antiX mirrors. You can choose between a full or basic install, 32 or 64 bit. For example, the full 64-bit download is a file named

antiX-16.1_x64-full.iso

2. Make a note of the location where the downloaded file is.

3. Insert a USB stick into the PC, one that is large enough to hold the downloaded file.

4. Determine the device name of the USB stick. An easy way to do this is open a terminal window
and type

mount

to display mounted devices. The USB stick should show up at the bottom of the list with both its device name, i.e. /dev/sdc1, and mount point listed. All you need is the device name.

5. Important. You now need to unmount the USB stick so it does not show up when you type in the "mount" command. You will need to be root on your system, or have sudo privileges, in this example: umount /dev/sdc1 or sudo umount /dev/sdc1

6. Next, copy the ISO image to the USB stick using these commands. The first command will take a while.

# cp /path/to/antiX_filename.iso /dev/sdc
# sync

In this example, type in the path to the downloaded file, space, then add the name of the USB device. Your device name (/dev/sdc) may be slightly different. Whatever it is, do NOT include the partition number (the 1 in /dev/sdc1), only the device name (/dev/sdc). Make sure you specify the correct device because it will get completely erased and overwritten.

The sync commands tidies up a bit.

That's it. Thanks.