Good distro for older low-powered net book.
 

I have an old Acer net book that I'd like to use as an easy mobile device. I've installed Linux a number of times, but never really made it my main OS. Last time (a few years ago) I tried to install it on an older laptop, #! was the best distro of the couple I tried (in terms of running smoothly on and older slow machine). The most I'd be doing on this is basic word processing and note-taking, and some basic statistics. Wouldn't be my main machine, but I'd want it be snappy for using on the bus, traveling, etc.

Wondering what the best current distro would be for such a machine. I don't have specs handy, so I know it's hard to judge, but it's 4 years old with probably 4 MB of ram and a 1. something Ghz processor (or less).

Thanks in advance.

-Matt

Assuming you mean 4GB of RAM then pretty much any distribution will work but I would tend towards using LXDE or XFCE rather than Gnome or KDE.

The DE is what matters the most. Pick a lightweight DE and the distro is almost irrelevant. Anything with XFCE, LXDE, or similar lightweight DE or WM should be fine if you truly have 4 GB of RAM (I'm assuming the MB was a typo?).

Edit: is there an echo in here???

Or, if you can tolerate using it (some people can't), a good tiling window manager and no full desktop will be even snappier in performance.

Small, or VERY small
 

You might try puppy (small! comes in different 'flavors'), TinyCore (12M), or DSL (50M). Puppy handles WIFI adapters best. These are VERY small GUI distros that perform well even on older hardware. All provide a full desktop with wired network capability and lots of features.

The big question is: what will you use it for?

For most of what I do, no gui is needed. I could run with MICROCORE for most things. (MicroCore is from the same people and site as TinyCore, and is about the smallest LinuX distribution (8M) I have ever seen!)

These mondo-small distributions may be perfect for you, or may lack something critical that you need. (They come with a community of wonderful fans, supporters, and applications that fit the profile that smaller is nearly always better and more elegant.) You need to either provide more information about what you are looking for, or give a couple a try (they are all in live-cd default that only installs to hard disk if you jump through some hoops) and report what works for you and what you miss.

<byl: the run on sentence master without lisp (lots of insipid silly parentheses) credentials>

If you liked Crunchbang and wish to stick with it.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/crunchbangmonara/