Best Distro for W Africa

Present · 01-13-2005, 05:09 AM

Greetings,

I work in W Africa each spring, and many of the contacts/colleagues I come in contact with are using obsolete computing equipment. Any suggestions for a light-weight distro that has good french support? Should I suggest they ditch KDE/Gnome in favor of something lighter too?

I would like to make up a sample CD to distribute during our time there with a fast distro.

thx,

pres

reddazz · 01-13-2005, 06:35 AM

Try Slackware coz it's optimised for older hardware.

Present · 01-15-2005, 01:15 PM

cool. does it have good french support? they speak only french (& various african dialects). i think they have been using mainly windows, is there a default slack install that wouldn't be too difficult for them?

reddazz · 01-15-2005, 01:38 PM

Frankly speaking I don't know if Slack has good French support. I come from Southern Africa so we tend to use localised versions of English. I know Mandrake Linux has good French support (it's a French distro), so it may be worth looking at it. Ubuntu also has a French version.

Present · 01-15-2005, 04:07 PM

would ubuntu be better than mandy on older computers?

reddazz · 01-15-2005, 04:22 PM

Well, Mandy has good hardware detection and support so it may run fine on older hardware. Maybe if you download several different distros and take them with you, that way, you will have a few to try out before settling on one.

AlexV · 01-15-2005, 05:30 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Present
Should I suggest they ditch KDE/Gnome in favor of something lighter too?

Yes, those two are huge resource hogs. If memory is limited, avoid them. That RAM will be of more use to other apps.
You might want to look into the Xfce Desktop Environment. I haven't used it that much myself but I think it would meet your needs.
There's a 50MB Live-CD called Luit Linux that is based on Xfce and has a good selection of desktop apps. It should run on old hardware (it claims Pentium I w/ 32MB RAM). Give it a try and see what you think!

Hope that helps!

Present · 01-23-2005, 03:03 PM

hey,

we're here in W Africa. got luit linux downloaded before coming and will be installing it shortly. does anyone know how to set French to default language with Luit Linux?

thx pres