[dundee] Old laptop

[James Le Cuirot]

On Thu, 5 Jul 2007 00:26:44 +0800
"Nistur Effee" <nistur at karate.com> wrote:

> Hmmm where to start? I have a very... stubborn mother. She has an old
> Win98 laptop that she uses for childminding, *shudders* edutainment
> style games and the like however, with it being a cast off from one
> of the parents it has thousands of faults and takes hours to do
> anything. She has so far been totally against the idea of putting
> Linux on it because "she won't know what to do". Going with children
> everywhere, I'm going to ignore her. I'll install Linux and see what
> she says, then install 98 after if she insists. I was just wondering
> what people would suggest in terms of distro. The HDD is only 2GB so
> Ubuntu/Minty is out of the question and I'd like to think I could get
> a variety of distros into working shape with some fiddling. Does
> anyone have any experience with lightweight (or maybe older versions)
> designed for Windoze migrants? (first one to say Lindows sits in the
> corner)


It depends exactly what she needs it for. If you can get all the
programs she needs installed in the first place, it might not need
much fiddling. My girlfriend uses Gentoo Linux, despite not having a
clue!

Regarding the small hard drive, it's tricky to make a recommendation. I
know which distros are huge and which distros are tiny but 2GB is
somewhere in between. For tiny distros, Damn Small Linux is quite nice
but that might be a bit too minimalistic.

What I really wanted to add was this. I was sick of my Dad using
Internet Explorer and he refused to try Firefox so one day, I installed
Firefox and gave it an IE skin. I renamed all the shortcuts to
"Internet Explorer" and changed their icons. He didn't notice at all
and when I asked him about it a couple of weeks later, he wasn't really
bothered! The really funny thing though is that I went to do Windows
Update at one point and got told that Internet Explorer. "But this is
Internet Explorer!?... Aaah! Hahaha!" So yeah, it worked so well, I
even managed to fool myself.

James