The Brand New UltraMegaSuper "Which Distro" Thread

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <Linux-Distributions>, and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Clarence27 - I have merged your thread into the "Which Distro" megathread as it fits better there.

Originally Posted by Arow Does this, or can this, include all the "which distro" polls too? There's quite a few laying around these forums.

If you see threads which you believe are better here, please report them. I am merging the ones I find, but the more eyes on the issue the better.

Hello there, I'm a student who recently moved into a new house and found that previous tenants had left a load of stuff behind, including one Toshiba Satellite Pro 4200 series Laptop with two unactivated installs of Windows XP. I have since wiped the hard drive clean and am now looking to install Linux on the system to turn in once again into a useful system, but which distro would be best for this ageing system? Does anyone have any ideas?

The system specs are:

Toshiba Satellite Pro 4200
Pentium 3 (coppermine) 447MHz 256KB cache
64MB RAM
6GB Harddrive
24xCD-ROM
1 (yes one) USB Port

All I really need this system to do is some basic office tasks (word processing,etc.), web surfing and e-mailing.

It will work better if you can add RAM -- then you could install Mepis or Kanotix
-- RAM for old systems is often cheap
With only 64 MB you will need to install a light distro such as DSL or Puppy

Mike

So,

There are times when some one who hardly knows what a computer is comes to ask from some familiar "nerd" to install an operating system or do some cleaning up for the computer.
Luckily, i'm not in that situation right now but maybe in the future. So, better to be prepared.

When there is a computer at some puplic place it is usually put in kiosk mode. That means you just can't acces the tools wich would do some harm to the computer.
So, I'm searching a Linux distribution that is quite easy to install and it has only web browser and power off functions when starting normally to the kiosk mode. Installing should be easy because eaven some Windows users might want to install this kind of os for some one and it is quite annoing to install it for three days to some one elses computer with out getting some profit from it. When some one wants to install some software in it and get it work in the normal mode he has to do some kind of magical trick (normal user has no idea how) that gives him a root login asking for password. After that there should be a good possibility to install some software for the normal user. For example Software for a music player or DVD player (+ codecs). Of course eaven this is annoying. There should be an small "start SSH" icon and a little gui for it. I dont mean any kind of options but a window that just says "SSH is open" or something and when user starts it accidently it is easy to shutdown. Through SSH the helper should get the root command after logging in with normal (extra) user that has only "su" command or something else that is secure. Everything that normal user (idiot) sees is a very simple gui with big icons for programs and an easy shutdown button...
There are many more features in my mind but it is just a waste of time every ones time to write them down now.

So, does this kind of distribution even exist?

Originally Posted by XavierP If you see threads which you believe are better here, please report them. I am merging the ones I find, but the more eyes on the issue the better.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...osing+a+distro

Xandros is an good option for that.
http://www.xandros.com

Originally Posted by odcheck Xandros is an good option for that. .xandros.com

...
I wasn't thinking of purchasing it...
Totall open source is better in my opinion. The reason why I ask this is that I have seen may people having this kind of problem and I think it would be a good to have on distro for this kind of purpose. On the top of that if I just could find the "kiosk mode" program eaven I could create that kind distribution from LFS and get an installer for it. But it is simply too much work: one or two years time and quite lot dedication for it. After that there is still the maintaining and distributing.

The easiest way is to have one of the famous distro developers create this kind of option when installing the distro.

Please refer to this thread/sticky.

Dheath - I have merged your thread into the megathread.

I was wondering what would be a good linux distro for the following computer?

750Mhz AMD Duron Processor
64MB RAM
8MB nVidia TNT2 Vanta LT Graphics
D-Link DFE-530TX+ 10/100 FastEthernet PCI
20GB HDD
4x CDROM

Requirements:
Office Suite
Web Browser
Print to a IPP printer (Ricoh AP204 on a CUPS server on my LAN)
IM client that supports AIM, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, Jabber

I am currently using ZenWalk linux, but the speed reminds me of frozen molasses.

Originally Posted by verdeboy2k I was wondering what would be a good linux distro for the following computer? 750Mhz AMD Duron Processor 64MB RAM 8MB nVidia TNT2 Vanta LT Graphics D-Link DFE-530TX+ 10/100 FastEthernet PCI 20GB HDD 4x CDROM Requirements: Office Suite Web Browser Print to a IPP printer (Ricoh AP204 on a CUPS server on my LAN) IM client that supports AIM, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, Jabber I am currently using ZenWalk linux, but the speed reminds me of frozen molasses.

what window manager or desktop environment are you using on zenwalk??

I am currently using XFCE4/Fluxbox. Fluxbox runs faster, but I saw no noticable application speedup.

Originally Posted by verdeboy2k I am currently using XFCE4/Fluxbox. Fluxbox runs faster, but I saw no noticable application speedup.

well, if your distro's binaries are already i686-optimized (and you don't have any unnecessary services using RAM), i don't think you could expect any gains from switching to another distro... then again, if you are able to try a source-based distro which will make all your binaries k7-optimized, then perhaps you might see *some* improvement, although i seriously doubt it would be anything to write home about... your best bet would probably be to add another stick of RAM...