My mother is having surgery tomorrow, and she just asked if I could bring my old laptop for her to check her e-mail while she's recovering in the hospital, as she has a pending lawsuit and needs to keep in touch.

The trouble is, I have little use for a laptop these days, and the ancient thing still has Windows XP on it.
It is an HP Compaq NC4010 with a 1.70ghz processor and 1gb of RAM.

All she needs it for is to run Firefox, primarily to get at her Gmail account, and also she sometimes gets sent links to YouTube videos, so it needs Flash as well.

My mother is not very computer literate, and can barely function in Windows 98SE, XP, or 7, or previously Mac OS 7.6, 8.1, and 8.6.
X-Windows is a must, with some easy icon she can double-click on to launch Firefox.

Also, and this shouldn't be a problem since I've seen it on every distro I've ever used (which isn't saying much), but she might also want Open Office Writer on it too.

My question is, what would be the easiest distro to install and set up with those minimal requirements and get the wifi going with minimal hassle as far as driver and other hardware compatibility.
Preferably something as easy as installing Mac OS 8 or 8.6 was back in the day, that I could then get a reasonably current version of Firefox installed with minimal fuss without having to spend all night compiling it (and I'm not even sure if I recall how to do that).

I myself haven't used Linux in about five years, or at the best since 2011, and I've never been as proficient as with Windows. I'm most familiar with Fedora (from 5 years ago, I think it was 13 or 14, maybe 15) and from when I first learned Yellow Dog 2.3 (back in the early 2000's on my PowerMac 6500/300), but I might as well be a newbie due to my skills atrophying.

I also need reasonable anti-malware defenses for using a laptop on a public wifi network (the hospital's complimentary Wi-fi) with somebody who is prone to making stupid mistakes to the point that I don't let her have the admin password to her own Windows computer.

I have a degree in Information Systems from the early 2000's, but my training in school was mostly Windows with some basic intro to rudimentary Unix commands, on par with what a "computers 101" course would teach on Windows.



As I didn't get asked until shortly before I'm going to bed the night before I have to pick her up for her surgery, I really need something that is going to be really easy to install, set up, and bring to her either tomorrow or the day after.


On the other hand, there is nothing of value on the XP laptop, no data to steal, and it's simple (but time-consuming) matter to wipe the hard drive and reinstall Windows, Microsoft Office 2003, Firefox, flash, and the k-lite codec pack, so maybe I shouldn't bother converting it to Linux and worrying about the machine being hacked in the hands of a user prone to making ID-10-T errors like falling for the "you need to upgrade your flash player to view this site. CLick here to download & install the latest version" trojan...Three times and making me have to waste a Saturday cleaning up the infection.

Oh, the terms of her paying for my college education was me giving free tech support and repair to her computers and other electronics.


P.S. If this isn't the right form to ask "Which distro should I use", what other forum should I use, and where should I post a similar question about making my old Windows 98SE/Windows XP Dell Optiplex GX110 tower a triple boot to Linux so I can use it as a backup computer? My needs on that system are far different from what I need for my mom tomorrow or the day after.

The link below has a list of Linux distributions that should run well on older hardware. The only two I am familiar with are Lubuntu and AntiX. On either the interface or GUI is going to be different from windows. There is a brief description of each and a link to their respective sites. The second link is to PCLinux which has a minimal version called mineme which has more of a windows look.

http://distrowatch.com/search.php?ca...=Old+Computers

http://www.pclinuxos.com/get-pclinuxos/kde/

i recently installed crunchbang on a similar hp.
runs great.
it takes 10min to install.
to make it more like windows, i simply installed xfdesktop and xfce4-panel, and removed tint2.
that took an hour or so.

I'm not sure on the policy here for thread necros.
I apologize for not getting back sooner. I was stressed with worry about my mother, and I just went and let her use the laptop with XP and AVG free antivirus since that is what she knew and I decided she didn't need to deal with the stress of trying to use Linux instead of the more familiar Windows.
My mother is not computer literate.

However, she's now well enough to travel and wants to visit some people in Florida to get away from the cold snap we've had here in the Chicago area. She asked if she could take the laptop so she can check her e-mail while away, possibly using internet cafes. I learned back when I started this thread that she does NOT know how to use wi-fi, just assumed that it would work like at home with the permanent Ethernet hookup. She also said "Could you just do it? I'm not feeling up to playing with the computer" when it came to connecting to the hospital wi-fi network.

I'm going to have to teach her if she wants to do this, but I'm not sure sending her off with a laptop running XP is the best idea these days.
Given how fast Linux changes, should I use one of the ones mentioned in this thread?

There are two considerations. One, I'm a decent Windows IT tech, but not so great at Linux. It will be my job to set the thing up, but I really don't want it to be too great a task to locate drivers and get the thing working right.

The other thing is that there can't be too great a learning curve for my mother, who is not very good with computers and is computer illiterate. I don't think GNOME will be that difficult, but I don't want to pick a distro that comes with some "better" X-Window manager that is too different from Microsoft Windows, not matter how "easy" it is to learn. You and I may not have a problem adapting and see the benefits, but we are not the end user, who is LD when it comes to operating computers and electronic technology (the opposite of me, where I have a natural aptitude).
I need something that will let an L.D. (Learning Disabled) Windows user operate a computer running Linux and successfully use Firefox, open .DOC[x] or .PDF files e-mailed to her, and watch any linked YouTube vidoes without any learning curve.

The setup would be done by me, the more experienced and adaptable user, so the end user experience is more important than ease of setup. I am still a novice at Linux however.

So, do the suggestions mentioned earlier fit the bill? I have about a week to get this done and show the person how to use it to connect to foreign wi-fi networks such as the one at the library.

I know this doesn't answer you but consider an alternate idea.

Get her a tablet maybe. Some cheap 10 inch ones out there are easy. My 89 year old mother does use one, sort of or at least well enough to use skype and email and a few games. She knows how to connect to wifi on it.

Without knowing how well your mother can adapt to linux and if she can navigate connections may make any linux too difficult.


The only way to be sure is to put a low resource one on it for her and let here test. For the most part the nuts and bolts of linux are similar between the distro's. Once you get the apps and drivers set up she will have to learn some tasks or have phone ready to call you.

setting it up properly, almost any distro can be made "like xp".

i had another thought - if your mother is overwhelmed by connecting to a public wifi, you could get her a mobile broadband dongle.

it's a very tangible way of connecting and disconnecting from the internet.
i know this from experience with other non-nerds.

with networkmanager, about 99% of the 3G ones should Just Work (e.g. huawei).

It was intended to be a cheap solution without putting any money into it.
She doesn't need it much, it was just "Can I borrow the laptop since you haven't used it in years?"
I'm also unemployed and looking for a job, so any purchases would have to be on her dime, not mine, and she doesn't care enough to spend money.

The site below has minimal information on a few Linux distributions. There are links on the page to the site for each distribution so if any look interesting you can go there and get more information.

http://www.tecmint.com/linux-distrib...old-computers/

Each Linux distribution has several components which can be freely exchanged. There is no such thing like "desktop" in Linux - there are many desktops, most of them comes with flavours. "Destop" is a part od system which can be completely removed. Or you can install , on the same system several different desktops: KDE, Gnome, XFCE, LXDE, Mate, Trinity or create your own. If your mother wish to have experience like working under WinXP, then I suggest distribution which out of box offers Trinity Desktop. I would suggest top-down procedure: start from recent versions of distributions, if there will be problems with efficiency try older version. My experience is that Linux runs well on both modern and older hardware. Contrary to Windows there are no strict hardware requirements.