Hi,

I am having a hard time finding a linux distro for my secondary computer. It is an old laptop with only 1Gig of Ram and is a 32-bit machine.

I have tried to use DistroWatch, but I don't fully trust their tables anymore. Sometimes it is my fault, because the most recent distribution on the table is sometimes one that is still in development or an unstable release and I don't always check the column heading before clicking through the link. But there have been other times when I have been sure that the left column is a current stable release, only to discover after downloading the iso, and testing it out, that the package list is totally inaccurate.

Anyways, here are the nonnegotiable needs:

Live-Medium, using a live disk (DVD/CD) instead of a live USB.
Firefox: It has to be 60 or greater, out of the box (the biggest challenge, considering my computer is 32-bit).
Inkscape: Any edition
A program to crop and rotate images. Gimp is more than enough but not necessary.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

I recently pulled out an old Pentium IV I have run Fedora on for years - 1G 32-bit running full gnome3. Slow but effective for what it was, a testbed. Probably ran it up to F25/6.
I see they still have 32-bit spins for things like LXQT - might be worth a look. Dunno about gimp though - that might be an issue on a Gig these days.

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Try AntiX. it might not come with this stuff out of the box but you can use several different Debian repos. Let us know what you decide

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Mageia 6 32bit Live Xfce edition, should run okay. I once ran Mageia, probably 4 at the time, on my Acer Aspire netbook with 1gb of memory. It was running Gnome 2 with no major issues.

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OpenBSD "current" has Firefox 62 on x86, ImageMagick for manipulating images and Inkscape 0.92.

AntiX or Tiny Core - just add the software you need.

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I'n not quite clear what you need, since you say it must be a live version on DVD, not USB. Do you mean that you actually want to run it off the DVD, or just that you want to try before you install and your conputer won't boot from USB? If you want to run off DVD (dead HD?), you're out of luck as you don't normally get Inkscape on an installation disk. Of course, if you use USB you can create a medium with persistent storage and add your own Inkscape. If you just want to install from DVD, then any distro can obviously be installed that way.

Are you really sure you need Firefox 60+? Not many distros have it: AntiX and Mageia, suggested above, are using 52! Of course, you can always get a new version direct from Mozilla.

Go for the Xfce desktop, unless you can live with a minimal window manager. I'd suggest the Xfce version of Mint, which may give you Firefox 60 — the standard version does. Xubuntu doesn't — 59.

mx linux meets all your requirements, as long as your live disc is a DVD. too big for a CD.

you will have to install inkscape, but its in the mx-packageinstaller->popular apps tab, so it should be easy.

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We'll I'm back and here to report my findings. Before starting this thread I had tried a number of other distributions, but I will limit my quick comments to the distros listed in this thread. Fedora 28 Designer Edition for 32-bit did not boot. Medeia worked but didn't have inkscape installed. I haven't tried Tiny Core yet, and I already have tried a previous version of AntiX (back when I was experimenting with 32-bit distros in general).

The distro that I chose was MX. I had to make a custom live disk from a live session snapshot, but MX has that capability out of the box.

Thank you for your help and thank you to the MX team for including snapshot/iso tools.