What version of Linux to install on a laptop? [closed]

"Don't get too hung up on which distribution to install - it is the applications which really matter, and your main applications are the desktop and the word processor. I think you would be best off getting a distribution that has a wide choice of desktops and checking them out one by one; try XFCE, LXDE, Openbox etc. You can also try Gnome: you may prefer a richer desktop that is a bit slow to a faster but more basic one. Similarly you could try out the various word processors that are part of your chosen distribution.

(As an example, I am running OpenSuse 11.2 on an old Dell CPx laptop, 500MHz processor, 192MB of RAM. OpenSuse is not normally considered lightweight but during the install I just chose XFCE rather than KDE as the desktop. With Google chromium running with 5 tabs open, and a terminal with htop running, htop is reporting that I am using 99MB of memory.)

You may need to be careful how you install Linux: your computer will find it much easier to boot an installed distribution than a live CD. On this machine I installed from the network install CD without a problem, for Ubuntu based systems you would be better off choosing install straight from the boot menu (assuming Ubuntu hasn't changed that much from what I remember)."

"I would also recommend CrunchBang (aka #!). It's a distro built with Netbooks in mind, is based on Ubuntu, and uses Openbox for the window manager. It's lightweight, and has a great user community for questions/configuration/suggestions.

The interface for Openbox might take a little while to get used to, but it's definitely nice to have something different. I ran it for 6 months on my older laptop and am now running it in a VM on my Mac."

"Since it's so old, your best bet is probably grab a few live CD's and try them out to see which ones run best on your hardware. Open office is a hungry beast. It's not my first choice for editing on a really anemic machine.

You might try Lubuntu - an LXDE based ubuntu variant."

"I ran, so far, Gericom (less known ex-european brand), HP, Toshiba and Fujitsu-Siemens laptops.

If you're new to linux, may I suggest OpenSUSE? It has an forbidable community (compared only to Ubuntu by some), and in my experience is a little better when it comes to drivers for little more egxotical hardware (wifi, video cards ...). Nice documentation, and all in all, a very tidy distro."

I used to run vector linux light on a pIII 733 with 128 mb of ram- and really your ram is probably the bottle neck as far as your system is concerned. If you just want a word processor abiword is a good thing to try- as opposed to OOo i think