Distro for K6-2, GUI and easy package management
 

I have a K6-2 333 MHz (i586) HP Pavilion with onboard SIS graphics. As a 3rd attempt newbie not knowing quite what to prepare for I started with Mandrake 9 but the mouse wouldn't respond. So off to RH9 but Gnome was unbelievably slow and RHN was horrible. On to Slack 9.1 with KDE default - pretty good (and so easy to switch window managers) but a little slow, but then I found that package management is not a strong point.

So now I'm considering doing a hard disk install of Knoppix and then using apt-get, or alternatively Gentoo, in the hope that a custom install will make things faster and that Portage will be good. However, four hours into the install on a P4 with much more bandwidth is making me think that this is not a trivial matter, and that doing it on the HP is going to be excruciating.

Any other alternatives? (And will a 2.6 kernel yield any noticeable speed improvements over a 2.4 kernel?) And I have in fact tried Win2K on the HP and - for shame - it's been faster than any of my Linuxes so far.

Instead of using KDE or Gnome, have you considered a lightweight desktop manager such as Blackbox / Fluxbox / IceWM ? They are not as resource intensive as the others.

Baldrick

you could try Fedora Core 1, which is user friendle, has YUM for package management. However it is shipped with KDE or GNOME by default.

but try Baldrick65 suggestion and use a more resource intensive window manager.

Yes, I've tried Fluxbox and IceWM, as well as XFce, although I realise that's a desktop environment, rather than a window manager. Yes, they're certainly faster in general, but don't quite have the "snap" of a smooth running GUI. I think sometimes it's the app as much as the desktop/wm. Dello loads in a flash, for example, while even Opera or Firefox take a little while.

I'll happily go with a wm if necessary, but I'm still left with the problem of package management. I have some spare disk space, so Knoppix will go on tonight if all goes well.