Hey, well i found an Old laptop in my closet and thought i might as well put it to good use. Its a Toshiba Satellite 2060CDS, i believe its a pentium 1. I tried installing Ubuntu on it but got this error:

[ 332.551939] Out of Memory: Killed process 3121 (gconftool-2)..


so im thinking theres not enough memory on this ol' beast so im currently downloading a copy of Xubuntu in hopes that it will run better.

My question is, am i correct in assuming that ill need Xubuntu to get it to work on this old computer, or is there another way. Or perhaps is there a better copy of linux out there that would be better for me? I want something user friendly, im using the laptop mostly for hooking a webcam to my telescope and recording stuff, storing star charts and the like. Games and such wont hurt but im mostly using it for astronomy stuff. Thanks in advance.

edit to say: that i already deleted windows via Fdisk so its completely empty now.

How much ram memory do you have, and how big a hard drive?

harddrive = 4gig lol

ram, i dont even know lol. Im not pro with computers so outside of checking in windows i dont know how i could check

edit: my dad says 64megram

You should be able to get a small distribution on there. You won't have much room left for data. Maybe try Beafantix

so that xubuntu wont be good? its at 82% so i dont wanna cancel it if it will still work lol.

if i use that beafantix version do i use:

BeaFanatIX 2006.2 final or BeaFanatIX 2006.2 final isolinux, i dont know what the 2nd one means lol. And will these be OS's that i boot off a cd every time i start? its not a problem if thats how it works im just wondering.

I think the 2nd one. It appears that that one is for PCs with only one operating system. I'm not sure tho. If it doesn't work, try the first one. You probably do NOT want the live cd.

One thing you'll have to get used to with Linux is that there is quite a bit of experimentation to see what works. Once you've got it working, tho, it works really well.

The second one is for dual booting a machine with windows and using the windows boot loader. The first one is for a machine running only linux. Xubuntu may work for you depending on the memory that you have in the machine. If not I would definitely look into BeaFanatIX as the docs say that it is targeted at new users.

ya im not likeing this live cd thing lol, takes so bloody long to load anything! does that beafantix have a complete OS or just the livecd's? if there is one on that site i couldn't find it.

OK im installing xubuntu now it hasn't locked up/crashed yet ad it sounds like its working, but its been going for god knows how long, it just finished this part of the install:

Configuring Network interfaces... [ok]

now its doing something else but its getting nowhere fast. I hear the cdrm working away in there but its not progressing in the install. so i dont know what to do, i dont wanna restart cuz its come so far already so if i have to ill leave it running overnight and check it in the morning but is it supposed to take this long? is it just my computer? or did it lock up or something?

HA after over 1 hour it has moved on ever so slightly, it now says INIT: Entering runlevel: 2 lol ok just happy knowing its not locked up :P

I've edited the title of the thread so that it reflects the contents and moved it to the Linux Distributions forum. Other distributions you can try are Fluxbuntu, Debian with the Fluxbox Window manager, Damn Small Linux and Pluppy Linux. Slackware will probably work as well if you use Fluxbox or Window Maker.

if you want to try some other Minimalistic Distros try:

Vector Linux 4.3
http://www.vectorlinux.com/

DSL
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Puppy Linux
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=3

Slackware
http://www.slackware.com/

SLAX Live CD
http://www.slax.org/

BeatrIX
http://www.watsky.net/

Elive:
http://www.elivecd.org/

you can find more here

http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributi...Distributions/
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/

Maybe give Deli Linux a try, I haven't gotten around to trying it out yet But I've heard it's good for prehistroic laptops:

http://delili.lens.hl-users.com/

hope this Helps

Jake

BeaFantIX is a fully installable distribution - the reason it runs slow as a LiveCD will be down to the amount of RAM you have, and the bus and CDROM drive speeds of your PC.

I currently run it on two laptops (366 MHz & 700 MHz) and two desktops (450 MHz and 900 MHz) and it runs fine on all of them - OK, the 366 MHz laptop is a bit sluggish, but it was with Windows 95 as well...

Better off with a small distro for that thing...Ubuntu will be too much for it. Xubuntu "may" work out ok, but I am not too familiar with it.

I say a stripped down version of Slackware, Damn Small Linux, or Puppy would be good for it. I am more partial to Puppy myself...got it on an old Dell Pentium II laptop and it runs quite fast for such an old system.