The live session ran relatively well. Firefox, Thunderbird, Abiword, Gnumeric, Pidgin, and Gimp all ran from the CLI without leaving any warnings. Unfortunately, Parole kept loosing the picture: I had to take it by the toolbar and shake it to restore the view! I installed VLC, but that had the same problem, and Gnome-mplayer wouldn’t work at all.

The real problem came when I tried to install it: the installer crashed and all it had to say was “unrecoverable error”. I ran it from the live session, I ran it from the boot screen. I downloaded another copy from a different mirror and burnt another disk at minimum speed. Whatever its merits as a live CD, it simply won’t install on this computer. There is nothing special about my hardware and over 100 distros have been installed on it, but not this one. Not to be defeated, I downloaded the alternative CD: no live session and a text-based installer, but it offers to verify all its files and it actually installs.

If the installer works for you, or you use the alternative disk, and if you don’t want videos, Xubuntu will be acceptable, but you’d be better off with SalineOS, Salix, or LMDE.