[Liverpool] Advice

[Richard Smedley]

On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 16:20 +0000, Sujita Purushothaman wrote:
> Hi,
>   Hoping some people here will have good suggestions. I have an old 
> laptop that currently runs on Windows 98 ( :-) ). It has 10GB hard disk 
> space and 128 MB RAM. Pretty old. I want to install linux on it. I 
> wouldn't be storing much data on it, I'd still like to leave Windows on 
> it, so I have 5GB to play with. What distros are lightweight, but have a 
> easy to use package management system? ( I would need python (+devel) 
> and gcc libs immediately). Thanks!

Debian will be fine - choose the laptop packages during
install. You probably want to install IceWM as your 
window manager, if you want something light but
Windows like. XFCe would also be fine (thus XUbuntu
is another choice - or OpenGEU (formerly Geubuntu)).

GNOME will run too, but things will grind if you open
up OOo or Firefox.

btw What laptop is it? Some old ones have problematic hardware,
which is usually well-documented somewhere.

 - Richard