My wife has an old Fujitsu Lifebook 280 laptop (specs below), and would like to ditch Windows. She now hates having to use Windows (in general – she currently uses a Mac with OSX in the office and has some experience with RedHat linux) and is looking to replace it on her laptop. I run linux exclusively, so I can handle (most of) the odd glitches that may crop up during installation/use, but I don’t want to adminster her machine. In fact, she’d prefer to take care of it and not rely on me at all. (Yay, independent and intelligent wives!) Can anyone recommend a decent Linux distribution they think she can handle and that’ll run on her older hardware?
Some more information regarding distro choice: she needs a windows environment, along with the standard apps (e.g., Mozilla/Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.) At one point, I installed a pre-fedora version of RedHat; it was so slow as to be unusable. So, of course, anything that uses a heavyweight WM is out. A weird limitation on her CD drive – it’ll only read 650MB CDs.
I’d perfer a distro that’s a LiveCD, so she can try it out before doing a new install. I was looking at a LiveCD Roundup recently posted on OSNews, and am checking some that are listed, but I figured it might be a good idea to get some other opinions as to good/bad recommendations or experiences on any of them (or others that didn’t make the list). In particular, it sounds like Ubuntu and a bunch of others are out, just because they require more power than the laptop has. I’m looking at DamnSmallLinux and Luit, since they’re recommended. They mention SLAX, which is intriguing to me 'cuz I’ve never dealt with a Slackware machine. Does anyone have any advice, experience, or recommendations for these or other distros?
I used to run SuSE on this machine, then I switched to Gentoo. Things run a lot better; but on the machine you have, I’d only install it if I had a few days. Also, keep documentation handy!
No matter what distro you pick, you can always install a different WM and use that. I, personally, am hooked on IceWM. It’s similar to KDE, but it’s very lightweight and doesn’t have pretentions of being a “Desktop Environment”. Also, for most customizations you have to edit config files. I don’t use desktop icons, but you can definitely make them happen.
I tried a few linux OS versions with front end GUIs about a year ago, and found (IMO) the claim about much lower resource use with Linux needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt. The Linux versions I tried with comprehesive GUIs hammered the PC resources about as hard as Windows XP ever did.
I’m partial to FreeBSD, be sure check it out before you make a decision. It’s a relatively easy install and the ports collection makes installing things very easy for a newbie.
As far as liveCDs go, I highly recommend Knoppix. It’s a complete Debian installation including “recent linux software and desktop environments, with programs such as OpenOffice.org, Abiword, The Gimp, Konqueror, Mozilla, Apache, PHP, MySQL and hundreds of other quality open source programs”.
Search for Linux threads, and you’ll find plenty of rebuttals to this. Suffice to say that a minimal KDE install on Debian Stable runs fast on a bottom-end Pentium. But a full everything-included setup, as found with typical ‘helpful’ distros such as Mandrake, provide exactly the same bloat as Windows includes as default.
Thanks to all who responded; I appreciate you taking the time. Just to be clear, I’m looking for a distro that my wife can install/administer, with little help from me. A kind of “set it up and ignore it”, but that will work well on older hardware. Hopefully, with minimal setup help necessary. It’s not that I couldn’t install any one of the distros, just that she doesn’t want to have to keep pestering me whenever she has an issue.
I think Gentoo is out, because she doesn’t want to take the time. (And, oh my, I can’t imagine how long it would take to compile from source.) Also, she’s already indicated that switching window managers is more than she wants to do. From what I gather, many distros are out just because of the specs of the laptop (tried RedHat, Ubuntu seems to want 256MB of memory, Knoppix needs a 700MB CD, others have similar limitations). I realize that I’m kind of defining the question away such that there may not be a good answer…sorry about that.
I have to wonder about the FreeBSD option; although I haven’t installed it myself, I know some people that have and they said installation is really easy. Perhaps that would work well. Or, perhaps I just have to accept that either 1) nothing is appropriate, or 2) I need to take a day out to install something like a base Debian and set it all up for her.
At any rate, anyone who’s looking at this might be interested in this: I came across this page of LiveCD distros. I’m in the process of choosing and downloading some of them. The first I think I’m gonna try is BeatrIX, which runs the 2.6.7 kernel and comes with Firefox, GAIM, and OpenOffice. I’ll post a message later (could be a day, could be a couple weeks) with any progress I make, particularly if I find one that both my wife and I are happy with.
Thanks again, and if anyone has anything to add, I’d be happy to hear more.
I tried both Beatrix and Slax. Both distros worked fine as LiveCDs on my computer (an AMD 2.5GHz, etc.), recognizing all my hardware. There were issues with the laptop, however, outlined below.
Beatrix is pretty slick; if all one has to do is web stuff and Office-type stuff, I could see using it and nothing else. Very easy and clear. However, it doesn’t include any media players (by design), which may make it too limited to run as is. Alas, I think it won’t suffice for my wife’s laptop; her CD drive is only a 4x. From what I gather, based both on the I/O error I was seeing and posts on the beatrix forum, the gnome-base is too heavyweight.
SLAX looks promising, but I haven’t gotten a chance to try it on her laptop (which will only read CDRs, not CDRWs). The problem is that, while it contains many applications, they’re mostly KDE based. So, one get Konqueror, not Firefox. Koffice, rather than OpenOffice, etc. It also looks as if it’s not as user-friendly (just an impression).