Linux for a Laptop

[BUGNUT]

A few years back I bought a laptop from my company as they purchased new ones for us. What I got was an HP Omnibook 4150, 500mhz, 256 ram and 10GB hard drive. It had Win 2000 Pro origionally installed. Prior to handing out the laptops to the employees the IT people wiped all the hard drives and installed Win XP Pro and office 2002. Now the laptop is a dog, and the OS with Office installed takes up 6.4GB of hard drive space. With Win 2000 Pro the laptop would preform very well, with Win XP Pro it takes 5 minutes to boot up. What I would like is a simple Linux OS that does not require a lot of resources to run. I won't be using the laptop for any power hungry applications only surfing the net, emails and programming my RC speed control. However a simple office package would be nice too.

As a last resort I do have a bought and paid for copy of Win 2000 Pro that I could install. However, I don't think MS supports Win 2000 anymore.

[kylepotts]

DSL and Piuppy Linux are good small distros that work well with limited resources

[BUGNUT]

I've done a bit of research and found that Ubuntu, Puppy Linux and PCLinux are the most popular at the moment. What I can't find is what are the minimum system specs for these distros.

[mikeL]

Here are the system requirements for Ubuntu, DSL, and Puppy linux,

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...emRequirements
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/i...e_Requirements
http://www.puppylinux.org/wikka/MinReq

[BUGNUT]

I installed PuppyLlinux. I tried it loaded to memory and it was very fast. When I loaded it to the hard drive it as much slower and things went wrong. Getting my high speed internet to work was a pain and once it was going I would loose the connection configuration after a few minutes of being inactive. I'm going to try Ubuntu today to see how it works. I want to keep the cdrom free for other things.

What I would really like is a small distro that is a no brainer to install. I mean like drop in the CD and come back in a half hour and everything is ready to go. I'm not a geek, I'm just a guy with a bunch of old PC's that like to tinker.

[mikeL]

I would try the Ubunutu, or Xubuntu they use Gnome (Ubuntu), and XFCE (Xubuntu) as desktop managers. Kubuntu uses KDE as the desktop manager and will take more computing power to run it

Also those requirements are for Ubuntu 8.10, 9.04 is the newest release. The Ubuntu line is pretty much as you wish toss in the CD answer a few questions and it configures all you hardware, as long as you don;t have a Atheros Wi-Fi based card you will be good to go.

[systempat]

That 10 gb hard drive is pretty small even for Linux. Not sure what your solution is unless you're willing to drop in a bigger HD. Even 40 gig would make it a lot easier.

[BUGNUT]

Spending any money on this laptop would be a waste of money. The money would be better spent on a new netbook.