What linux distro is best for this laptop?...?

Question

I have a very old laptop: 1.8GHz celeron

30 gb hdd

128mb ram......

which linux distro would be the best? i would like one with support for a usb wireless adapter b/c ive tried dsl linux and it didnt come with support.

Answer 1

That's not terribly old or slow, even though your Celeron is a P4-based one. Just get another 128MB of DDR1 RAM for about 30$, and you'll have a lot more options, up to and including Xubuntu. If you can't or won't upgrade your memory, I suggest Zenwalk. It's clean, stable, assuming, usable for beginners without annoying people with experience, and is known for performing well on older laptops. Its based on Slackware and uses the XFCE WM, though others are available in its repositories.

Also, are you sure your USB wifi adaptor is supported under the kernel either natively or with patches? Many if not most aren't. NDISwarapper is always an option, but ultimately a kludge, and it seems to confuse those who are new to Linux.

Answer 2

You're going to have trouble finding support for USB wireless adapters out of the box.  I was just about to type "DSL", when I read that last bit there.

Even the big, well-known distros like Ubuntu don't always have support for USB wireless cards out of the box.  If you use DSL, you could try ndiswrapper, which I think is a miracle piece of software.  You can use the Windows driver for your wireless adapter with it, and usually, get it working just fine.

Answer 3

My friend has the same type of configuration. Just try with Ubuntu. Its really that good. It works like GUI. U can do all that u work in windows.

For eg: If u want to open office - it has office of sun microsystems which is effective.

Want to do presentations with Adobe photoshop - It has Gimp, which is very very effective.

Much more applications. Just try once. U'll never try to switch over to windows when u work with such configuration very effectively.

Answer 4

Its a shame you don't have more RAM as that limits you somewhat. I would suggest perhaps you take a look at Linux Mint 4.0 (Fluxbox) http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_daryna_flux... Its quite nimble on machines with small amounts of RAM.

Perhaps you should look into increasing your RAM a little, I would say 512mb if you can as a 1.8ghz CPU is not slow for Linux distros.If you did this you would have many options open to you.

LUg.

Answer 5

http://www.puppylinux.org/ . For your wifi card use ndiswrapper and the windows driver.

Answer 6

Ubuntu