[Nottingham] Lightweight GNU Linux Suggestions

[James Moore]

On 07/04/2012 19:01, Kurtis Brown wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> After certain annoying circumstances, some crack addict robbing my 
> house, I am having to use a old Celeron laptop with 512mb ram. I have 
> tried Damn Small Linux (too slow) Crunch Bang (just didn't like it).
> What would be other peoples choice of lightweight distros? I am used 
> to having Mint 10 as my usual operating system.
>
> Kurtis Brown
>
>

I've found that OpenSuSE 11.4 (don't go 12.x yet, hardly anything useful 
works in OpenSuSE until the .4 subversions) does very well on light 
systems. I have one running on a virtual machine on here, with the 
following specification (with which I am extremely satisfied with 
performance using KDE4/Beryl):

Cores: 1 (@1.6GHz)/AMD-V accelerated, nested paging
RAM: 512MB
Display: AMD Radeon HD at 1360x600x32bit, 64MB VRAM, 2D/3D enabled
Storage: 8GB system (VirtualBox system image), mapped local storage 
through Samba to Host
Host: Windows 7 Home Premium on dual core AMD E350, 6GB RAM

I use OpenSuSE just because I love the thing. Switching between UIs is 
as easy as making sure the UI and all its dependencies are installed, 
then relogging - means I can experiment but I am most comfortable with 
KDE4/Beryl so I tend to stick with that. KDE/Beryl isn't the fastest UI 
on the planet, but then again you have to hit on a compromise: do you 
want fast or do you want pretty?