hi people I'm a die hard windows user but I'm not narrow minded.

I have an old ibm thinkpad that was running xp and badly in need of a reinstall (r50e) with 256 Ram.

I thought to myself netbooks often run linux so maybe I should give it a try.

This is for the kid's to play on so it needs adobe flash support and a basic browser.

I already tried vector linux and puppy Linux. I was very impressed with the speed and instant hardware detection.

Problem is whatever browser I try crashes or closes as soon as a page with. flash loads.

I tried disabling hardware acceleration in the adobe plugin as suggested by other posts but that made only a minor difference.

disabling the flash plugin fixed it in firefox but then no fun for the kids.

I know flash is poor but kids sites usr it in spades.

so any suitable distros or is it back to xp?

Give Debian a try, use either a lightweight DE like lxde or a window manager like openbox, icewm, fluxbox etc. And try using Google Chrome or Chromium from the normal Debian repos.

I am running Debian sid on a Thinkpad R40, but I put in 1GB ram so I could use KDE4.

Mint comes with Flash pre-installed, and is available with minimalist desktops pre-installed.

I tried installing Flash in Debian once, and it was horribly difficult, and still worked in only one browser in ther end. I would not recommend it whatsoever.

Lol apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree using the normal Debian repos or
apt-get install flashplayer-mozilla from the dmm repo

Works in every browser I have ever had installed including: Seamonkey, Iceweasel, Firefox, Chrome, Midori, Uzbl, Netsurf, Opera. Not once in the seven years I have been running Debian have I had to do more than the above commands to get flash working.

Something to keep in mind on this endeavor: Flash is developed (and optimized) for Windows first, with everything else as an afterthought. With a low-end system like that, you may discover that even the lightest of distros give unacceptably poor Flash playback. (I'd be curious to know if you discover otherwise, in fact.)

Like all reputable software vendors, Adobe has published hardware requirements for Flash:

www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/systemreqs/

For Linux the recommend minimums are:

Intel Pentium 4 2.33GHz, AMD Athlon 64 2800+ or faster processor (or equivalent)
512MB of RAM
128MB of graphics memory (maybe you can get away with only 64mb if you're not planning to watch hi-def)

1 members found this post helpful.

You could give Porteus a try. It's a live distro, though, so try it on a CD first, and if it works you can do a 'frugall' install to your hd. Might be good for the kids that way, because they won't be able to wreck the system as easily. It comes with KDE Trinity and LXDE (which might be better with your low RAM), firefox and flash.

I ran Crunchbang on my obsolete laptop for a while, and I found it very sexy and loved it if not for apt-get and synaptic . (They seem unable to ever properly uninstall programs and I find myself having to conform to what Debian wants on my computer ..)

Now it happily runs Arch . A bit tricky to install, but the end product has what you want on it and is lightning-fast .

It IS my guinea pig so I will probably soon be playing around with various distros on it . But all in all, Crunchbang and Arch are good for older hardware . Crunchbang ships with flash, and in Arch you simply configure your video card (not as hard as it sounds) and do a "pacman -S flashplugin" .

As for a lightweight browser, try iceweasel or midori . ;]

Good luck . ^^