[Gllug] back on the linux front

[Bradut Boghita]

Hello again everyone, 

I hope that this is still the resource where 'forever linux newbies' come for help... :-)

I have used Linux until about 2 years ago. Because of my work, I have to concentrate on the MS Windows stuff. My OS of choice remains Linux though and I hope that one day my employer will see the light... 

I put together a machine to run Linux at home. The idea was to make it my main desktop.  My needs at home are watching movies, surfing the net, some photo processing and that's about it. My machine last time around, a pentium2 400 Mhz, 256 of Ram, was doing all this very well. I had Debian Woody, with Kde.

Big changes all around it seems, with plethora of Linux distributions to choose from and many of those debian based. All appear to have netinstall disks as a matter of course, not as an unofficial install path as it was the case for debian some time ago.
I tried debian itself, but tempted by the more desktop specific distributions, I picked (x/k)Ubuntu. The install was a breeze, everything got recognised, although it did ask for a pc restart(...?! ). Gone were the problems of finding winmodem drivers or getting the display to work. Now the problems were something along the line of why doesn't my center speaker work in surround mode...:-)

The problem though is that is running very slow, even Xubuntu which is supposed to be 'lightweight', makes the harddisk churn big time. The machine is a pentium 4, 1.7Ghz, 512 Ram.

Is this normal ? Is there a particular debian based desktop that you would recommend for a, presumably slow machine now ? 


Thanks, 

Bradut


-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug