Re: An easy home version of Linux

Ray Olszewski
2004-10-18T20:20:19Z

At 11:58 AM 10/18/2004 -0600, Anna G. Zapata wrote:
>Hello everyone,
>
>Can someone recommend an easy to use, home version of Linux that can be
>housed on a 1.9GB harddrive, 252MB memory, and
>512 MHz? I've looked at Fedora and I don't think I have the resources for it.
>
>As always, thanks.

Once installed, all the major Linux distros are pretty much equally easy to
use. They do differ auite a bit in the details of getting them set up,
though, and it's hard to me (or anyone, really) to say what *you* would
find easy in that respect.

What you want to use the system for affects what you need in the way of
"resources", because it affects what parts you need to install. The RAM and
CPU speed you mention are marginal (I'm probably being too mild there;
"inadequate" is probably closer to the mark) for heavyweight X desktop
environments like KDE, for example. But I even have running here a very
lightweight X installation on an ancient P200, 96 MB RAM, about 2 GB hard
disk. (Compared to that, a 512 MHz Celeron, say, would seem downright
zippy.) I wouldn't recommend that sort of setup for complex uses, but the
limited uses I put it to (word processing, viewing PDF files) are well
within its capabilities.

As to what distro ... well, we all have our habits, and what's familiar to
somebody comes to seem easy after a time. I use Debian myself; its online
installs (using a set of boot/root floppies or an install CD, but getting
most packages from an up-to-date package repository) make it "easy" in a
way that matters to me, though it is pretty weak on identifying hardware
for you, so that part can be hard. Others like Slackware, which also has
its strengths and weaknesses, but is, like Debian, friendlier toward
stripped-down installs for low-resource setups.