Monday, May 19, 2008

Which Linux for an IBM T20?

I have managed to get hold of an old IBM T20 with a 256 ram with a 10 gig HDD which I want to give to a friend as a home laptop. This guy has only known MS and I want to make the experience a success. Allthemore that my friend lives in another country, and when I eventually give the laptop to him, I will not be there to sort any issue. Not that I could anyway, my skills are limited to installing the Linux distro and playing with the Grub config to make sure that the PC boots ok.

So I set my eyes on a light distro which will have a word processor, a browser, an ethernet easy to set up connection, Skype, a pleasing graphic environment and (very important) perfect stability.

Of all the distros I could find, Puppy Linux was the best, but TinyMe was the best looking (but the update just messed it up big time). So I started to look for a light distro which has the easy use of Puppy and the looks of TinyMe.

And you know what? There is no distro out there with an Openbox graphic environment as the desktop environment of choice. The closest I got to this was GrafPup but I could not manage to burn the iso image on a disk. And then, trying to decipher the forums of Puppy linux needs a PhD in computing, since the explanations are clearly not geared towards new users.

Shame though. A lot of time and patience is being used on showing off 3D desktops and useless graphical gimmicks, but when I look for a simple distro which looks good out of the box, no chance. I wonder why there can be no graphical desktop which looks great and still be light? Puppy Linux is nonetheless the ticket, I just hope that my friend will not be too taken aback by the 1996 look.

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