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Need Help in regards to choosing the right linux distro for my system.

Hello,
I'm going to explain my situation to you. I have a pretty old computer which runs windows xp service pack 2 with roughly a 35 gb hard drive, along with only 256 mb of ram. Now I need to figure out which distro would work best. I've taken many online "tests or quizzes" in which will help you choose the best distro and they all manly have openSuse or Fedora as the main ones and sometimes Linux mint. Now this is all well and good but it is my assumption all of these either recommend or require more than 256 mb of ram. I don't want to have a distro (unless recommended) that has a minimum of 256 mb because i don't want it to turn into something similar to xp in which is slow. So can i get some suggestion along with some reasoning on which distro would be best.

Thank you so much for any help! :)
ak47basketball

puppy linux is will just be plane fast.

Quote:

http://www.puppylinux.org/downloads/...uppy-linux-421

one question in regards to puppy, can it do any thing any other distro can do such as support wine, and other programs etc?

Puppy's that are good on lowram are browserpuppy47, gallipup412rev, pupflux-lite

and also tinycore, DSL-frugal, Feather, A Debian install with XFCE4 or LXDE
Slackware install with XFCE4 or similar.

Really, seriously, with 35GB hd, you could make 3 partitions(1 swap)
and install hd installs of debian/slackware on 1st and 2nd partition.

Then, manually(easy) install all the puppies above + DSL+Feather + Tinycore
and run all that frugally, and you could boot any of them at boot time.

I got like from 8-15 distro's running on my 160gb 7 partition hd
Most of them are frugal installs.

It's really simple too; just copy/place in correct place/ the contents of the puppy/dsl/tinycore iso's to the hd, convert isolinux.cfg to menu.lst, edit menu.lst
and boot.

Puppy's can simply be placed in a folder named whatever and will "live" there.

Here's part of my menu.lst for first 2 partitions.

Code:

title Browserpuppy47

root (hd0,1)

kernel /pup47/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 pmedia=atahd psubdir=pup47 

initrd /pup47/initrd.gz



title MyDSL

root (hd0,0)

kernel /Linux24 ------lots of kernel options, not writing all that:)

initrd /minirt24.gz



title Tinycore_2.1rc2

root (hd0,0)

kernel /boot/bzImage etc etc etc

initrd /boot/tinycore.gz



title Slack-On-Crack-12.2

root (hd0,0) 

kernel /boot/vmlinuz etc etc



title Lenny

root (hd0,1)

kernel /etc etc

So, you can name a folder "blue", put any puppy in it, edit
menu.lst and add "psubdir=blue", add kernel/initrd to "blue" folder

Oh, just move the puppy kernel/initrd from isolinux folder to whatever folder and delete isolinux folder.
And, when you go to reboot after booting first time, it will ask if you wanna make a certain sized pup_save, tell it to put it in the "blue" folder or whatever folder you have the kernel/initrd/pup.sfs in.

thanks for that info, but i suppose i forgot to mention that i want to keep windows xp (for now) so would that still work?

Ok, just looking and browserpuppy can install wine, java, etc
( http://www.browserpuppy.com/ )
see bottom left of page. It's fast too.

Actually, yeah, Puppy can do frugal install to windows computers.
When I had XP, I had a couple puppies living in folders on my C drive.

Here, look at this

( http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...linux.-657994/ )

( http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=16954 )

( http://www.puppylinux.org/?q=wiki/us...l-installation )

(

thanks for suppying the links for me, my only problem with puppy browser is the purpose is in its name as in it's just for browsing. I would prefer a all around good Linux os that is similar to xp.

You could install Debian or Ubuntu but you'll need to start from a minimal install and add on from the command line. I installed a custom Ubuntu over the week-end that fits into just over 900MB and that uses only 160MB of RAM on a system that has 4GB available (the more RAM linux finds available, the more it consumes - so on a more modest system, it would be even less than 160MB). A custom XFCE, Fluxbox, etc. on top of Debian or ubuntu would be better, though.

ok i don't mean to sound silly, but how would i do your installation process?

You could also check out Debris Linux, based on Ubuntu
CrunchBang Linux, based on Ubuntu
They both are "light"
I had crunchbang on my toshiba 7000ct 160MB RAM 4gb HD, and it's setup with small font's ect.

Search on this forum under "minimal debian install" or similar
many posts here about minimal installs:)

No doubt, I had heard Debian XFCE4 was much less ram-hungry, etc than Xubuntu, but I guess
Minimal Xubuntu is almost same.
Yeah, also XFCE4 is nice once setup right.

Debian with LXDE is much lighter than xfce/kde/gnome and it still gives you a taskbar/menu similiar to what you are used to with windows.
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/re...+lxde-CD-1.iso

Processes 94 Uptime 2 days Memory 144.5/492.9MB not even using half of my ram with lxde, pcmanfm,parcellite, and iceweasel with chatzilla and 4 tabs open. My desktop http://img359.imageshack.us/i/snapshot1.png/ I am too lazy to do much to it other than changing the wallpaper every few days.

@craigevil

I tried Pcmanfm some time ago but it did not appear to do video thumbnails. Is that something that can be tweaked? I guess ffmpegthumbnailer could be used for that but it supports only a limited set of codecs. Just wondering, it would have made a good alternative if it weren't for that feature.

Is Puppy as fully capable as other distro's such as openSuse or fedora? Can you install any normal linux program on puppy as well?