Lightweight distro for old laptop

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Tacet

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Hi all,

I haven't run Linux for a couple of years now, so I'm not up to date with the performance of the various distros.

I'm looking for a distro to run on an old laptop. The machine has only 1 GB memory (shared video), so memory is quite important.

The basic use of the laptop will be browsing (Firefox), email (Thunderbird) and Skype.

Any suggestions?
 
centos minimal is nice. however any linux distro would be fine
 
envo said:
centos minimal is nice. however any linux distro would be fine
Click to expand...

I've had an older version of Ubuntu on this same laptop before and it didn't work well. The machine was slow and unresponsive - basically not powerful enough for the distro. I don't know if gtk+2 was the issue (as I want to use Firefox I hope not!), but it wasn't fit for use. Unfortunately the old cliche of linux running well on old machines is simply not true - you need to keep your machine in mind when choosing a distro.
 
envo said:
centos minimal is nice. however any linux distro would be fine
Click to expand...

While Centos minimal is awesome you'll still have to decide on a desktop environment seeing as minimal doesn't come with a GUI. OP wants to use web browsers.
 
Tacet said:
Hi all,

I haven't run Linux for a couple of years now, so I'm not up to date with the performance of the various distros.

I'm looking for a distro to run on an old laptop. The machine has only 1 GB memory (shared video), so memory is quite important.

The basic use of the laptop will be browsing (Firefox), email (Thunderbird) and Skype.

Any suggestions?
Click to expand...

Windows 8.1?

Windows 8.1

If you want to run Windows 8.1 on your PC, here's what it takes:

Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster with support for PAE, NX, and SSE2 (more info)

RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) (32-bit) or 2 GB (64-bit)

Hard disk space: 16 GB (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)

Graphics card: Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM driver
Click to expand...
Source

I can pay personal testament to this, my little tablet has 1GB ram and it runs perfectly fine. Not to mention the fact that IE is probably the lightest of all the browsers when it comes to memory usage.

If Microsoft bothers you, then I would go for Puppy Linux. It is small, fast and really easy to use. Just need to get the .pet files for the software.

http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%20and%20Getting%20Started.htm

Skype instructions:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=94807&search_id=1263534254&start=180
 
konfab said:
Windows 8.1?
Click to expand...

I had 8.1 on (devel preview), which was very laggy. I never bothered to optimize it, as I knew that the version is due to expire. I'm now on the preview of Win 10. It is also laggy. I've optimized it a bit more, but I can't find proper drivers for the graphics card. Its functional, but certainly not smooth.

So no, I don't mind MS at all. I'm just not about to pay for an OS that doesn't run optimally on the machine, especially not on machine I mostly use for browsing and mail.

I've downloaded Bodhi Linux which is Enlightenment based. It is larger than some of the other versions mentioned, but seems to include most of the packages that I'd have to download with some of the others. I'll install and report back on Friday.
 
Might be worth your while upgrading your memory, I dug out an old Compaq 610 with 1GB at the beginning of the year because of the load shedding and tried a few distros but was never happy with the speed until I added another 2GB - it flies now on Fedora 21 Gnome!

Took me a while to track down suitable memory but I eventually found it at firstshop for around R550 incl courier fees.
 
I know XP is EOL, but if its just for skype, emails and the web....why not.
 
Rickster said:
I know XP is EOL, but if its just for skype, emails and the web....why not.
Click to expand...

And there are even some stripped down versions of XP out there if you are willing to Google a bit. I am sure I have a copy here somewhere.
 
Tacet said:
I've had an older version of Ubuntu on this same laptop before and it didn't work well. The machine was slow and unresponsive - basically not powerful enough for the distro. I don't know if gtk+2 was the issue (as I want to use Firefox I hope not!), but it wasn't fit for use. Unfortunately the old cliche of linux running well on old machines is simply not true - you need to keep your machine in mind when choosing a distro.
Click to expand...

Ubuntu is like the Windows of Linux. So if you are looking for something that's memory effecient that doesn't crash, you were looking at the wrong thing
 
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