I have an old Thinkpad Lenova T60 that a friend of mine wants me to install linux on for her 15 year old daughter. Her daughter will be doing mostly shocial networking stuff like twitter, facebook, skype etc... I know I can install Pidgin to cover most of her social networking needs. Does Pidgin do Twitter?

What distro would you recomend I install on this laptop that is right for a linux newbie who needs something simple, fast and easy to use (hopefully highly configurable as well.

Immediately I thought of Puppy Linux but I'm sure there are others that I may not be aware of that would work well with the T60. Looking forward to your recomendations!!

I'm not aware of Pidgin supporting Twitter... I'm sure you'll get a lot of suggestions so just try a few until you find one she's/you're happy with. I don't think you'll have any performance issues with that style of usage on a T60.

With a system like that you can go for basically any distribution, no need to go for a lightweight version, except may be that the integrated video chip may be is not supporting all desktop effects of KDE, Compiz, ... . I would recommend to go for something stable and easy, like Salix XFCE.

Well, Puppy is fast, but it's pretty ugly (something fifteen year olds don't much appreciate). The T60 would probably have no problem running Xubuntu or Lubuntu, both of which are fairly snappy and come with all of the amenities one would expect on a desktop Linux distribution. http://www.ohloh.net/p/pidgin-twitter

The place to find Linux information for the Thinkpad T60 is
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:T60
It depends very much on exactly which version you have. Intel or ATI graphics? 500MB or 1GB of RAM? If you have the smaller memory, Xubuntu should work and it supports all the T60 graphics cards.

For Twitter, I think the Opera browser has a plug-in available.

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I've got an 'older' t60 that I've had great success with using Ubuntu for the last few years. Right now I'm experiencing a rather annoying conflict with the graphics driver that is causing a sound problem, but I'm confident I can find a practical workaround, such as using the latest version of Ubuntu in a 2D session, which seems to work for some. Here' s a link to the bug that's almost a 'show stopper' for me: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...er/+bug/879790. You may or may not be affected depending on your graphics chip. Mine is the X1400.

It's my main system and I know I'll get it going again so when I do, I'll post back here with that distro I've chosen and how it goes. Do the same and let us know how things work out on your end!

K

[edit]I've settled on Ubuntu 12.04 in Unity2D to avoid the KMS/sound bug listed above. It's OK for now!

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Right now I am using Zorin 5 and it seems to work great.

Mint LXDE might also be a good option. All multimedia items with codecs would be available. Gwibber, which supports twitter, will also be available ....