I have some basic questions on Mandriva:
1. How usable is it on a computer with only a 500 MHz processor and 256 MB of RAM?
2. Is a minimal installation available? In Ubuntu, I can do a command line installation and then add just the packages I need. Is something similar available in Mandriva?
3. Where can I find a list of all software available in the repositories? For example, Ubuntu offers a list at http://packages.ubuntu.com/ .

Here's a quarter - buy a real PC

Seriously, you might want to consider Puppy Linux (lean/mean GUI) or Ubuntu server (no GUI, no fat, industrial-strength versions of whatever s/w you want to install):

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatI.../serveredition

PS:
It wouldn't hurt if you revisited Puppy, Knoppix, etc ... and posted questions about the specific problems you ran into. Odds are good they might be easily resolved ;-)

I'm part of the Data Acquisition group of Project Phoenix, an IEEE study group working on an open source blood pressure monitor. Our group's laptop with only a 500 MHz processor and 256 MB of RAM. We use National Instrument data acquisition probes.

I'm considering a switch to Mandriva because National Instruments offers support for this distro but not for Puppy Linux or Ubuntu Linux. The only other two distros that NI supports are Redhat and OpenSUSE. I already tried to install National Instruments software in Ubuntu but couldn't get it working. I thought Ubuntu would be our distro because of its vast repository (which includes Scilab and programs for microcontrollers), but it doesn't seem to work well with NI.

Mandriva does have a minimal iso image you can download from the iso directory of your favorite Mandriva mirror. The minimal instalation disk includes LXDE, a light weight desktop environment. You can see the list: Packages included in Mandriva Linux 2010 Free mini dual-architecture CD

The image can be downloaded from the Mandriva ftp mirror of you choice, in the ~/MandrivaLinux/official/iso/2010/ directory.

The file name is mandriva-linux-free-dual-2010.iso

HTH,

Jhsu -

You didn't mention the "National Instruments" requirement in your original post .

If you look at National Instruments' web page, you'll notice that different products have different levels of support. For example, some of their products only support SuSE 9.3 (a rather old release).

So if your choices are limited ONLY to those distros EXPLICITLY supported, then your choices are actually much narrower than just "Red Hat, SuSE, and Mandriva". You also need to regard the specific versions of each:

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/web...4?OpenDocument

Otherwise, if you want to just "make it work" - the possibilities are actually pretty wide open. And Knoppix, Puppy, Ubuntu-server and friends should very well be back on the table.

IMHO .. PSM

I have a similarly spec old laptop running Mandriva 2010 now. It's running the xfce desktop as I found LXDE abit too sparce. I had to install using text mode through the minimal CD ernie mentioned. After that I setup the repos and installed task-xfce.
It's not fast, but everything worked relatively smoothly. Rpmrake is horribly slow, so I use the command line urpmi.

Very good, ongte!

Seems that NI uses rpm builds, (suse, red hat, fedora, mandriva and maybe others)

The scientific community is not interested in the newest software, (Like us)

but on stable document-able OS install and software configuration.

Because it is scientific, they need to prove, statistically analyse, and reproduce experiments serveral times to justify the research. So the newest is not always the best.

Old Mandrake and Mandriva is still available, I've seen it, but no longer have the reference here.

afaik, all the way back to mandrake 7.

xfce4 is a very complete desktop, and you can turn off services and effects you don't want or need,(more that 1 or 2 desktops will slow the whole thing down considerably, and 3d effects is out of the question)

and uninstall packages you do not require, within reason.

There are some Scientific Linux distros, ie.
There's no reason why you can't setup these kind of programs in Mandriva 2010.0, that I can for-see. Maybe a painful experience though(steep learning curve).

Cheers, Glenn