ok so ive been a memeber of the forum for a while.I I did alot of research and thinking. I also played with a back track live cd.I thought ti perty cool then i thought id try somthing new. My neigbor gave me a stack of discs and a pentium 2 box with 256 mb of ram.processor speed is 300mhz. cool right,so I made me a copy of debian. It's perty easy to install,anyhow by default debian comes with gnome.its runs great, but its a bit slugish when launching the aplications, but once launched its fast.I was wondering if a different desktop management system would work better. such as kde or flux,or maybe some other desktop ive never heard of.all responses and replies are greatly apreaciated.another option would be more ram but thats a bit more of a costly approach to sink into an old box.


on another note does any one else get the feeling they are a guru when trying a new distro for the first time and flying by the seat of their pants.

With the low amount of RAM that you have on that system, I'd recommend a light-weight desktop manager, like XFCE. It's a very good program and is pretty stingy when it comes to resource usage.

Luck!

I would also say that go for XFCE or even more lighter Fluxbox.

I occasionally feel like a guru, usually just after I learn something new. Then for about 2 or 3 hours I am the "master" of the new found tool. Then I take a look outside of my tiny bubble and realize I'm barely scratching the surface.

-Chad

Definitely. I'm a huge fan of fluxbox due to my continued use and experience with it. However if I had it to do over again, I'd definitely want to at least give XFCE a shot as my "tried and trusted" desktop environment. DreamLinux is a good "example" of some of what XFCE's potential is.

-Chad

I normally run Gnome (on 4 distros) and KDE (on 3 distros) on my machine, but for a while, I had Slack installed with XFCE. It's a great application! I have 2Gig RAM, so resources aren't an issue on my system, so I ended up going back to KDE in Slack. However, that doesn't take anything away from XFCE. I still recommend it highly to anyone with resource issues, or even just to try.

Have FUN!

I have lately had an urge to get hold of a machine like that and try out VectorLinux with XFCE on it, supposed to be very good on old hardware.

With my higher powered Athlon 3200+ I'll stick with Fedora and Gnome for now

Mons

XFCE for me as well on taht kind of HW,

definatly not kde, its heavier than gnome

thanks or your replies now whats the next step i think i iwll try xfce but how do I go about installing it. I got the source file but i dont know how to implement it. I found the install file but it would not run it, itd judt spit an error saying that it did not know the charecter coding.

Check the package manager first when installing SW. Mine (Synaptic on Ubuntu 6.04) has XFCE available.

Not sure how Debian is set up, but I think there is a way to browse the Debian repositories directly.

I got it working its installed it took me all night to track down all the files needed to build it I installed it logged out and then it showed up in the desktop chooser I checked it as the option and logged in. its all systems go and I like it. The cool part is if i want to log back into Gnome I can. i also notice that at firs when launching applications for the first time it takes up to 11 seconds, but after running it a few times it seems to get faster.Could that be because it is putting the program in a cache.

Yes, caching is probably what's happening. Glad you got it working!

Have FUN!