hi my name is Dean i have dabled a very small amount with linux but i am very impressed with it i have a old dell (optiplex 745) which i installed linus mint on and is work well
i have a aspire with 2.8 seperon and 1.5 gig of memory (which seems to have the same spec as my dell)and 60gig harddrive i installed linux mint on it and it seems to hang for ages is there a sight i could look for to tell me what distro's work with certain prossesors and memory i would like to get it up and running for my daughter

devigate,

Welcome to LW.

Can you let us have exact details of your hardware on the second machine please?

What RAM, CPU etc does it have.

It is quite likely that you need to run a "lightweight" Linux distro such as antiX 32 bit in order for that PC to run properly.

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

http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?tit...Page#Downloads

Look at #23 onwards on this list:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...xp-4175502495/

1 members found this post helpful.

hi thank you for this very promt reply
the memory ram is 1.5gig (originally 512mb)
the processor is 1.6gig amd sempron

devigate,

The middleweight MX-15 32 bit from the Mepis community may also work:

http://www.mepiscommunity.org/download-links

Review:

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/mx-15.html

Older review:
http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.co.uk...iew-truly.html

Give antiX and MX-15 a whirl, plus any other lightweights you fancy.

1 members found this post helpful.

Is the seperon processor 64 bit? Does the system have accelerated graphics? Which version of Mint did you use on your pc?

AntiX is great but for a new user?

Mint is a good option with the Mate desktop, also Debian with Mate desktop will install on most systems but as with AntiX, not that easy to use but for different reasons (free software and cmd alterations of sources).

If Mint hangs then might be graphics but might be ram, there will be (I assume) a ram test available on the install disk, try that if it shows a lot of red then some ram is faulty.

Fred.

1 members found this post helpful.

Dean on Debian?

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post5541400

1 members found this post helpful.

Gentoo takes forever to install, because it compiles itself specifically for the hardware it's being installed on. But once complete, there is no distro better optimized. This use to be very important on older hardware -- which it sounds like you have. Newer hardware has so much disk space and ram, that such precise optimization is not as necessary. Gentoo also has good documentation.

Slackware also has good documentation. It works from a command line installer, and is intimidating to new users. But when you follow the documentation it works.

1 members found this post helpful.

I like multi-booting and have not used proprietary OSs for quite a while now. Virtualbox or other VM managers can help too... free to try most.

https://unetbootin.github.io/ lets you make bootable usb thumb drives for most any disto... you can start you computer off one of these usb drives and get the feel for the distro... see if it runs better, etc., without having to go through full install process...

2 members found this post helpful.

thank you for all your replies I will now embark on a quest to find all these destro's and try them out i am very impressed with the support you all give i am looking forward to the next part of the quest
i will inspect the laptop and post all the specs but not tonight got kids to sort out and wife to please by (washing up etc)

1 members found this post helpful.

jamison20000e,

yes but,
Debian will work on minimal hardware specs and many of them. Proprietary stuff is a problem and requires non free repos. and I like AntiX but what would be easier to use on the gui Debian or AntiX?

Fred.

I have used AntiX, Mint and many more built by communities (based on Debian +others) with goals and they rock! But, once we get use to things may want more control so a netinst is my favorite... most top distros put one out.

Including antiX. Choose the core edition - and it is libre!

http://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/linux/m...inal/antiX-15/

I don't know the level of Linux savy the original poster's daughter has, but assuming she is new to it, the gui on antiX might be a little off putting!

Less than Gnome?