Topic awaiting preservation: Small but perfectly formed linux distro

Hi chaps and chappettes, I've a linux question.

I have an old laptop, with no more than 256MB RAM, (I'll post more specs later) that I would like to install a distro of linux on, I do have one thing I'd like to maintain though and that's aesthetics.

I've been looking so far at Ubuntu and DSL (Damn Small Linux), and I believe that I really want something inbetween. Ubuntu uses teh latest Gnome WM and looks perfect, it seems to run pretty well too, but it does take a long time to boot up.

DSL boots up very swiftly but uses an old Windows manager that looks like something out of the 90's, I don't like it, and can't stand to use it, but it is beautifully fast.

Now I'm aware that there are more to these distro's than just the WM's that are slowing down the boot time and general useage, so I was wondering if there's a distro that's similar in size to DSL but can use the Gnome or KDE WM, I've not found any mention of either WM being able to be installed on DSL.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Blaise

You could always just install another window manager or desktop environment on DSL.

If you haven't tried Xfce yet, I recommend it ('t'is what I use). A couple good livecds that have it are Morphix's LightGUI version (Debian-based, like DSL & Ubuntu), and FreeSBIE, which is a FreeBSD livecd (dunno if you want to bother with the few hassles there are with using BSD instead, but it's got a pretty Xfce setup ). Some more listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xfce#Xfce_distributions.

Some other light (window managers this time) ones are Fluxbox, Openbox (both originally based off the same code, so they're similar), and Enlightenment (eye candy galore, and still rather small by itself). FVWM is uber-light and way cool. By default it's pretty tedious to make pretty, but there are packages to easily make it look pretty and be more functional. There's also IceWM which I haven't personally tried but have heard good things about - Morphix has an IceWM release.

Oh and regardless of how ugly the WM you have now is, chances are you can make it pretty (probably with incredibly little work, too) - if it's not very functional, though, that's a different story.

(Edited by reisio on 01-10-2006 23:33)

Well I ended up going with Ubuntu, I bit the bullet and tried installing it myself, and was delightfully suprised that it worked almost perfectly.

I had a little troube formatting the hard disk believe it or not, I think I just needed to restart the setup routine once I had partitioned, and then finally I had to set up my PCMCIA wireless card which wasn't auto detected, but searching on the Ubuntu wiki I found the answer straight away and it was easy.

My Laptop specs are a 600Mhz PII, with 192MB RAM, and 12GB HDD. It works as well as expected which is better than the previous Win 2K build, that could partly be to do with the fresh install of course.

I managed all that on myself, I'm very proud, now I just need to find out how you install programs on Linux!

Cheers,

The typical methods vary by distro. I think the preferred method in Ubuntu is to use Synaptic to use apt-get.

Blaise, there's an "unofficial starter guide" here:

http://ubuntuguide.org/

That one helped me quite a bit in the beginning, pretty good place to get started.

They still call it "Ubuntu 5.04 starter guide", but almost everything should work just as well with 5.10 (except for the apt installation sources perhaps - if you don't get it to work I can post my /etc/sources.list later).

If you run into to trouble and need quick help, just connect to irc.freenode.net and /join #ubuntu or ##linux.

Thanks guys, appreciate the help

Well another laptop is running linux right now, way to go Blaise.
I am still in the process of setting up my own laptop. My tools of choice where gentoo linux with icewm as window manager just to get the best perfomance out of it. One day it will be a very beautifull machine. However since gentoo is source based compiling all parts an then recompiling them due some stupid mistakes takes an awfull lot of time. After another recompile to test some settings i think i am actually almost ready to start using the system.

Gentoo is very nice but has two big problems:
1) Compile time even with the right settings could take days on everything lesser as an +/-2GHz machine (think about my poor little 500MHz laptop for a while..)
2) There is so much documentation you need google to search trough it....

Most Window-Managers can be themed pretty easily. For an responsive system i would suggest icewm or xfce or anything ellse what is not called gnome, kde or cde.

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:: Develop yourself, develop your life, develop the world ::
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If Gentoo is taking so much to instlal on your laptop, why not try something a little less resource hungry, does Gentoo come with some functionality that you particularly need??