Recommend me a distro?

Stinicker

I am not too into Linux and have only ran some live cds in the past. However I recently got given an old Panasonic laptop (toughbook) as a freebie dating back from 2000, it is an ancient old thing running Win 2000 :eek: and has 7GB of storage and 128MB of RAM.

It is pretty usless as it is and I want to load a very light OS into it so I can use it for the net, I won't be downloading and only need firefox and a fast load up time.

It has only one USB port and no other drives so I will have to load the OS from a USB key. (I have an 8GB one) so no worries there.

My two area of concern are it has a Touchscreen and a PCI slot which has a pci network card as it does not have an onboard network card, wireless or lan.

Any ideas?

Dorsanty

Sounds like you need, 'Damn Small Linux'

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

EvilMonkey

or Puppy Linux
http://www.puppylinux.org

Dardania

Chromium OS?
http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/

evercloserunion

Just to be clear. Do you mean you'll only need the USB stick to install the OS to the computer, or do you want to load the OS from the USB all the time? If it's the latter, is that really necessary?

Stinicker

evercloserunion wrote: »

Just to be clear. Do you mean you'll only need the USB stick to install the OS to the computer, or do you want to load the OS from the USB all the time? If it's the latter, is that really necessary?

I will format it and install Linux onto the hardrive as the operating system.

evercloserunion

Ah cool. In that case I would recommend Arch Linux. The thing about Arch is that you install the very bare bones of what is required to run the OS, no graphics or apps or anything, and then you install them yourself. So you get to choose exactly what goes on your laptop, and you can look around and find some very lightweight window managers and the like. It's good for building a lightweight system but also for learning a bit more about how the OS works.

BostonB

Websites these days can be pretty demanding. That machine might simply be too slow regardless of OS.

evercloserunion

BostonB wrote: »

Websites these days can be pretty demanding. That machine might simply be too slow regardless of OS.

Well, you can configure some browsers not to load some of the more memory/CPU heavy parts of a webpage. With Firefox you can get addons for it; with some more lightweight browsers, they can't support more performance-heavy websites anyway.

Mycroft H

lightweight browser = lynx

lightweight distro is debian + openbox

Naikon

I use plain ol Debian myself. I always start out with a netinstall image and build everything to my liking. Namely, I like using Openbox + fbpanel as a light desktop. I hate the default Gnome install, because it pulls in Alsa drivers by default(Ubuntu is worse, it pulls in a rake of pulseaudio/gstreamer dependencies which can suck imo). Minimal install ensures I can install OSSv4 for PCM playback too. Fluidsynth + Qsynth is great for MIDI over timidity++ imo.
I am in the process of doing a Linux from scratch install, but for servers and desktops, you won't beat Debian I think. >=18,000 packages + easy updates is a blessing. Failing that, a Debian netinstall ftw:D

digme

start living in 2010 and get linux mint !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BoB_BoT

digme wrote: »

start living in 2010 and get linux mint !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They need a very light OS based on the specs they stated.

BopNiblets

So get Mint XFCE or LXDE flavour!
http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=1505
or
http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=1473