Hello, I'm hoping someone can give me some advice here. My brother has an older PC that he just uses for the internet and email, that's it. I believe it's a pentium 2 333 with 256mb ram, but I don't remember exactly. It's old anyway, but it works. Currently he has windows 2000 installed on it, but it's having some annoying problems that probably aren't worth the time to troubleshoot. Since I don't have a win2k install disc, I thought maybe linux would be a good option. Now, my brother isn't a computer expert by any means, but he knows what he's doing and doesn't have much trouble learning new things. Is there a linux distro suitable for this purpose? Something light on resources and straightforward to use, and a web browser that's actually going to run on that system (which may be faster than I stated, I don't recall). Thanks!
I've got a laptop with those specifications and it happily runs Kubuntu 6.06. The boot time is a little slow, but once the system is up it works OK. Xubuntu 7.04 might be a better option for you.
I can give a few recommendations but with one caveat; new user friendly distrobutions of linux tend to be heavy on the resources so the recommendations I will make are fairly user friendly but not the cream of the crop in that regard. Vector linux. Fast, simple and mostly easy to use. It's built on slackware and has optimized packages, that is what makes it fast. For basic web and email, this would be a fine choice but don't get the SOHO version because it requires a newer computer. I've used Vector for many months in the past but it didn't suite m needs personally. Fluxbuntu. Based (loosely) on Ubuntu the most popular linux distrobution available. Light on computer resources but it doesn't look finished just yet. It's worth trying, but I don't have any experience with it. SaxenOS. Very light on resources and it claims to be easy to use. From what I can see, it accomplishes that goal. It also claims to be new (to linux) user friendly. I haven't used it myself though. Also as sniper stated, Damn Small Linux is another choice but I'm not sure about it being new user friendly but I haven't tried it. ___________________________________ If the computer has better resources than you stated I would take a look at simplyMEPIS. It is compatible with any pentium processor with at least 128MB of RAM and 4GB of hard disk space. I have this running on my girlfriends computer (PIII 733 with 128MB RAM) and it works just fine for her. It is very easy to use and is reasonably fast on that old computer. For user friendlyness, MEPIS is very hard to beat.
There are many light distributions of Linux, but many are targeted for more advanced users. I've also heard that Puppy is good, but a couple more you might want to test-drive are Xubuntu and Fluxbuntu as well, both based on the popular Ubuntu Linux.
i agree with Sniper[ot]although it quite a while since i used Puppy but i remember it as being a very light distro[/ot]you can even burn Puppy to a CD or credit card CD or even a USB pen (for installation)
