Re: An easy home version of Linux

[Ray Olszewski <ray@comarre.com>]

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.







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