What's the best distro for low end laptop?

moo113 · 04-13-2005, 05:57 PM

I have an old PII 266MHz laptop (got to love my school's crappy equipment) with 128MB and a 4GB hard drive and I want to slap some distro onto it.

Only problem is, I'm not sure which one. I'm fairly familar with Red Hat offspring nowadays but I've heard slackware and ubuntu would run fairly well on poor hardware.

Any thoughts?

timothykaine · 04-13-2005, 06:14 PM

Vector Linux is ideal for what you want.

Its based on Slackware so runs well on old hardware, and has many enhancements for older laptops.

stonux · 04-13-2005, 06:54 PM

Spend some more thoughts on the window manager than on the distro.
i.e. definitely not KDE

moo113 · 04-13-2005, 08:17 PM

I was thinking of using either IceWM, but more likely XFCE since it's nice and lightweight.

timothykaine · 04-14-2005, 01:08 AM

Fluxbox, Xfce and IceWM are your best options given the power of the laptop. Those are listed in order of popularity.

Fluxbox will be the lightest, Xfce will feel more familiar if youve used Gnome, IceWM is somewhat of a Windows Classic clone.

moo113 · 04-14-2005, 03:27 PM

Don't want a windows clone and I like Gnome so probably XFCE is what I'll use. Does Ubuntu 5.04 come with XFCE or will I have to install it seperately?

timothykaine · 04-14-2005, 11:11 PM

You can apt-get it. Follow the instructions at www.os-works.com to get the latest version.