Hello all thanks in advance. I'm looking for a Live Linux Distro that can perform standard desktop funtions such as Email, IM, Internet, Word Processing etc... as well as media specifically play CD's and DVD's. I will be using this on an old Laptop, (Dell Inspiron 7000, it sat on a shelf for a few months) when I finally powerd on the laptop again I found that the hard drive just grinds and grinds and can no longer boot Windows Xp. So I am looking at Linux so the laptop can still be used. I have run Knoppix on it in the past just to see what linux was all about and it runs fine. Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks,
The Kingbee

Well, if you want to play CD's and DVD's, you probably want to have 2 CD drives, one from which to run the Live CD and the other from which to play your CD's and whatnot. Otherwise, you're going to have to try to copy the entire live CD to a ramdisk (e.g. via the "copy2ram" kernel parameter in Slax), and that's a task for any live distro.

Yea if you dont have enough ram its gonna freeze. I can copy small distros to a ramdisk. featherlinux or damnsmall linux If you have a gig or more ram you can fit the whole knoppix cd in ram

Thanks for the replys but I was thinking of something more along the lines of the multimedia program being loaded in to ram so I can then take the OS Disc out and put in another disc. I think Mandrake (Mandriva) or Morphix supports this but I remeber the last time I tried installing something with one of them I couldn't, it was very difficult (I'm a newbie). I became frustrated with linux and basically gave up on the idea of adding something if it wasn't already provided with the Distro.

Thanks,
The Kingbee

Movix,