Linux OS help

[Codie]

Right, Ive had my GF's EXTREMELY OLD Acer laptop off'f her as she has a Sony now. Here's the spec:

Windows XP Home (5.1,2600 Build)
Mobile AMD Athlon XP 2400+, MMX, 3DNow, ~769 MHz
RAM: 190 Mb
Pagefile: 113MB used, 352MB available
Direct X 8.1
20GB HDD split into C and D partitions

Crap I know but it's old and will only get thrown away so thought I may aswell play about with it. I used to have a Toshiba P100 Satellite 17", Centrino duo 1.66 GHz, 1GB DDR2, Direct X 9, NVidea GeForce graphics but cant remember what exactly. I don't have the Ram drive but took the processor out the other day so have that and also fitted the Rewritable drive out of the Tosh into the Acer and tried to change the processor over to see what would happen but the Intel is smaller than the AMD so waste of time and wont go in.

Not the point though. As I was intending to use the Acer as a playaround laptop I wanted to install a Linux system on it. I managed to install Ubuntu 9,10 (latest) but no surprise it was EXTREMELY slow at loading, took hours to get the desktop and wouldn't respond to anything I did for ages so thought it would help to get a linux made for low grade netbooks or 10" and below so I installed Kubuntu netbook and I couldn't get that to work properly so tried Kubuntu netbook remix and that did nothing either so tried a few random ones but got nowhere. I installed them on the D partition after a format.


Anybody suggest a Linux OS that would run on that spec laptop, plan on having XP on C and Linux on D?

Cheers

and yes I know the laptop is poo and may aswell be thrown away but I wanna use it for playing about on and if I can't put Linux on il just use XP for something else.

 

[gladson1976]

You can try out these distros

Puppy Linux
Feather Linux - About
DeLi Linux

They all require only 128MB RAM with a max of 130MB hard drive space and they are all GUI based

 

[Codie]

Oooooooh yes, im gunno give puppy a go first, apparently Grub is better than Windows version of dual boot or something or other because when I tried to install GeexBox it kept saying grub can't be found or something along those lines.

 

[Lordbob75]

Damn Small Linux might be worth trying as well: DSL information

~Lordbob

 

[MilesAhead]

Mandrake

You could also try to find an old copy of Mandrake 9.1. If you have broadband it's great because the install initializes your network card and downloads your selected packages. iow, it's a One CD install. I used it on my Gateway Pentium III with 128 MB ram. No bloat on that esp. if you set it to use a light-weight window manager. But where it's a bit old you may want to check for a hardware compatibility list.

There is a new Mandriva that still has the One CD install though.

 

[Codie]

Puppy is on, it's not in the boot loader list thing. Basically when I tried to get Kubuntu to work it put it in the OS loader list so I could choose which one but puppy isnt in there so How do I do it?
I downloaded the ISO to my current laptop and burned it to disc, then booted from there.

Also is there anything cool I can do with a linux OS cus apparently Linux is for people who want to develop OS or Software or anything so wondering how to go about doing something along those lines. Just stuff to get me started.

I may try other Linux OS's, Puppy has a partitioning tool but has locked the D partition.

Any coding or developing or whatever you have for playing around with windows and linux let me know

 

[Lordbob75]

Codie, it is not JUST for those things (they can be done in windows too), but for everyday use as well.

There should be an option in the installation (try installing from the Live CD) to write over the whole drive. This should set you up just fine.

~Lordbob

 

[Codie]

Ill have a go at doing that in a minute. When I booted the ISO disc which im gonna guess is a live CD (I hope) it went throught the setup then saved my setting to the D partition but it is still named ACERDATA so I have to override that partition and make it Linux. In the OS I went to Grub bootloader config to try and see if that would do it but I clicked simple install of GRUB, use standard linux console and it says:

Puppy Linux users: If running from the universal installer,just accept default entry,click OK button.

Where do you want the GRUB files to go?

Usually they are Put with the kernel in the /boot directory.
What partition has the /boot directory you want to use?
Put the partition (/dev/hda2 etc.) in the box below:

Don't know what to do or if that's an alternative to another install?