nicely on 12 GBs. Choosing a distribution is like choosing a pair of shoes.
We all like something different and it comes down in the end to personal
preference.
There are several ways to look at it. There is a continuum with speed and
down to basic on one end and usability and lots of WOW features on the
other. With your hardware you should be looking at lower middle as all of
those features at the top end are at a cost of lots of resource consumption.
Another way to look at is by architecture, but that is not a concern for you
are you have a common chipset. You can also look at it by package
management. Packages are the applications in pre-installed form. There are
several schools, but the two big camps are RPM and Deb. RPM is for Red Hat
and its derivatives and Deb is for Debian and its derivatives. There are
more distros that use RPM, but there are more variations in its
implementation. Debian is more consistent across distros and there are far
more packages in this format.
Finally there is support and this comes down to popularity since support is
community based. The more users the more helpers. Some communities are less
friendly and more ideological than others (on a mission). Most are great and
welcome new users.
Distrowatch.com is the place to go to get distributions and they maintain a
top 100 list based on page hits, not downloads.
My thoughts are if you are a beginner and do not want high maintenance then
go for one of the more common distributions. Ubuntu is number one by any
metric. It is Debian based and it has huge repositories (maintained storage
sites of applications). It has a big and supportive community and it has
corporate backing. You have minimum specs for it. It comes in many varieties
with different desktop environments as the from end. For older machines it
has Xubuntu with XFCE and it has Lubuntu with LXDE which has even lower
specs. There is a no fuss Ubuntu derivative that is very popular called
Linux Mint and almost everything written about Ubuntu applies to it, too. It
has no corporate backing and it does not have as many varieties. All of the
ubuntu derivatives use the same installer and are easy to install and use.
Ubuntu has a free online monthly magazine and many podcasts.
Another good choice is PCLinuxOS. It is RPM based so it gives you a good
alternative. It is a smaller distribution but it has an active and
supportive community that puts out a free monthly online magazine. It works
on most hardware and you meet its minimum specs.
I also like to recommend SimplyMEPIS and antiX which are the same
distribution, but MEPIS uses a full KDE desktop environment and antiX uses a
lightweight Fluxbox desktop. They are Debian based and like PCLOS are a
smaller distribution with good support.
If you want to go really lean then consider Puppy Linux, but it means that
you will run fast but have fewer options available to you.
Good Luck!
Roy
Using Kubuntu 10.10, 64-bit
Location: Canada
On 3 February 2011 11:29, matt1027 <box1027@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
>
> I would like a recommendation on a linux distro for an old laptop.
>
> It's an IBM Thinkpad T20, Pentium III processor, 256MB Ram, about
> 12GB Hard Drive, so I don't have a huge amount of space to work
> with. It does have a DVD drive for installation.
>
> I want to use the computer to open documents and files that come from
> untrusted sources.
>
> The laptop has Mandriva 2006 on it right now and OpenOffice from that
> time won't open the .docx document that I want to check out. So it
> would be a good time to just upgrade the whole operating system and
> get the most recent OpenOffice in the process.
>
> Besides opening questionable files I might also check email on
> it. That's probably about it.
>
> Any recommendations would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Matt
>
>
>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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