I have 2 old PC's / Laptops I would like to bring back to life with linux.


1) an AMD 800Mhz with 300Mb ram and 80 HDD. Currently running openSUSE but this is a bit sluggish with GNOME.
this will be a PC for a 13 year old. It will have to work with MSN and Java games like addictinggames.com and notdoppler. Openoffice is also essential.

2)P1 266Mhz 64MB ram Toshiba laptop 8GB HDD. This would be for a 6 year old. Educational games like cbeebies etc. Would need a driver for a USB wireless dongle. Obviously would need to have a gui but only very simple.

Any suggestions?

for pc you allready got Suse installed on: install a window-manager (i like fluxbox or icewm) and from the login-screen choose it instead of a gnome-session. If it pleases you it might be the case is closed.

i pretty much like antix (which comes with said fluxbox and icewm):
http://antix.mepis.org/index.php/Main_Page
but its debian-based (so a different package-manager than Suse...).

there is also SOAD (SuseOnActiveDiet):
http://en.opensuse.org/Live_CD#SOAD_...nux.29_live_CD
which comes with enlightenment as a wm, but, if i recall correct, with some other wm`s too. i think i didnt like it, it was neither fast nor usefull (for me!).

you might try that first
if OpenSuse has got the gconf-editor too: (install it) open it and go to
apps -> metacity -> general and activate -> reduced_resources
you might also go to:
desktop -> gnome -> interface and disable -> enable_animations.
perhaps set a colour as a background.

it wont be flying, but it might work better after that.

Hi, and welcome to LQ!

Quite frankly, I'm running Kubuntu on a PIII 800MHz CPU w/384Mb RAM with no problems. OpenOffice is included, and you'll only need to install the restricted-extras, which will include Java, Flash, multimedia codecs, and more. If it does turn out to be sluggish, install xubuntu-desktop. It's a little like Gnome, but lighter and much faster. CentOS and Knoppix work just fine, as well. OpenOffice can be installed later, as with any distro with which it's not included.

Not too sure what you can do with the laptop... IIRC, even Puppy (the smallest distro that I'm aware of) requires a minimum of 80Mb RAM. Hopefully, someone else will chime in with something that will work.

Cheers

CDLinux!
it comes into 64+mb super-duper light version and a 254++ mb community version, both on XFCE, I cant be sure because the official site is down for some reason but I also thing it also features fluxbox

download it from here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cd-linux/files/

Slackware 13 would do that if you use Xfce not KDE4 (KDE3 would not be problem IMO). SLackware comes with KOffice but slackbuilds.org has a script to repack the rpms from the offical sources.
for that system, you need an older distro. something with 2.4 or 2.2 kernel (you may have a driver problem). if you do a careful package selection at the start you should have no problem with Slackware 13. but try 12.2 first.

del

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