my old hp omnibook 6000 is running ubuntu dapper drake right now. its my first and only distro that ive tried besides red hat (not sure which version or even if it was redhat but it looked too much like windoze to me). i know some people like madriva on here and i was gonna try that, but im not sure if it will run on my laptop. and no more gnome. ive messed with kde and i prefer it more than gnome. so if anyone can recommend me a distro that can run on an old laptop well post it. im open to suggestions.
Slackware.. but it will take some messing around to get everything you want working. If it's running ubuntu without too many problems pretty much anything will run. Mandriva may be a bit demanding.
For my older laptop, which is a p2 366 I use zenwalk. It is a very good slackware based distro. It used to be known as minislack. There goal is to be a very nice distro that is very lean with nice desktop and good multimedia enhancements.
well im downloading the slackaware 11.0 iso now. but i just read now that zenwalk has a package system that slackaware does not...therefore, there is much testing to be done.
Slackware does have a package system.. it's a secret but it is called "slapt" and "gslapt". Similar to debian apt-get/aptitude. http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/02/19/0836244 http://polishlinux.org/linux/slackware/ quick link to vector-linux, which has all the gslapt commands http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/docs/vl58/manuals/vl5_slaptget_en.html#gslapt I know my way around the *nix world eh? Have fun.. slackware is great. a little hard work sometimes, but the best hands on distro going. Every slackware question answered. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/forumdisplay.php?f=14
If you liked Ubuntu but didn't like Gnome, you could use one of their sibling distros, Kubuntu, I like it a lot better than using Ubuntu.
Little bit of research. HP Omnibook 6000 Pentium III-1000/700, 128MB of SDRAM, 256KB L2 cache. Though it runs ubuntu quite well if that's all the ram it has it will struggle with both gnome and kde when things start to get hectic. I run debian on a similar spec machine and often hit low memory issues with 512. Ubuntu was just too resource heavy, and kubuntu was crashy. A look on these forums will show that we are not keen on ubuntu and it's derivatives, for good reason. If you try do do much more than install things from the "approved" packages you run into troubles which can't be easily resolved. Things are non-standard in ubuntu.. It lasted me 2 weeks until the annoyances outweighed the advantages. Slackware sounds like a good choice, and it has kde as standard. Let us know how it goes.
well i downloaded slackaware 11.0 iso and zenwalk 4.4.1, burned them to cds. i tried installing the slackaware cd first. all was well when it started installing, but then an error message saying that some packages were broken so i couldnt even install it. same happened with zenwalk but at least with that one it fully installed. now while its loading it freezes and says that some program is trying to use the files. anyway,im trying mepis. dunno why. just am. i would reburn the distros but i deleted them after i downloaded, and the download took a long time for both. so i guess ill update again as i try out stuff.
Strange with slackware, but then again I always just install a pretty basic core system, then add what I want (just like I build a server, from the ground up with only what I want). I may get to installing slackware later this weekend after a change of use for my NAS. (It's heading to be an online game server) I do remember the slack installer being a bit funky, especially the partitioner. I always partition/format drives with a damnsmalllinux live disk, because the cfdisk implementation at runlevel 2 is the best I have found. A hint.. you can burn all this stuff on r/w disks, saves money in the long run because most linux distros have a pretty quick turnaround cycle. I only burn things I really like to once only.
alright, so i decided to install Xubuntu as my main distro on my laptop, just cause its like ubuntu but lighter on hardware. currently i have the mepis live cd and its pretty cool. just trying to get my wireless card working on it right now. some other people recommended zenwalk so by the end of this week i hope to have downloaded it. also looking at damn small linux. dream linux looked cool so im checking that out. so i guess theres more testing to be done. its just hard adjusting to different setups when im so used to the ubuntu one.
Yup.. I can explain why ubuntu is buggy.. It's built from debian sid, which is unstable. What you need for wireless is the ndiswrapper package. You should be able to install it painlessly with your package manager, then hunt for the windows driver for your chipset. I don't do wireless, but there should be plenty of info on the forums of whatever distro you choose. ps.. To get to the formatting tools in DSL when you get to the prompt type "dsl 2" and it will load you to a root prompt where you have mount and unmount tools, partitioning and formatting tools.. just don't expect nice GUI things, they are all command line. Slackware probably wanted the drive partitioning and formatting in a certain way.. again the home site is the best place to start..
