The Gun Counter

Mrs Denis is travelling, and her fancy MacBook has developed a problem with its network connections. She has sent up the baloon for instant technical support(TM), so I'm on the hook.

Rather than waste time sorting out the Apple, I want to just hand her another laptop, so she can be operational. The one I have handy is an IBM (not Lenovo!) Thinkpad X40, which is at least six years old, and probably more. It hasn't been used in so long that I will need to replace the CMOS battery, but it was a high-class Pentium M machine for its time, and very reliable. I don't have its full specs handy just now.

Anyhow, the version of Windows XP on it is so old, that it will take an eternity to update (if that even works), so I thought it would be a better job all around to blow it away and install some flavour of Linux, especially since I have to get on the plane with the machine in about 18 hours, and I don't want to spend them all updating Windows.

So, any suggestions for a decent lightweight distro which will have enough GUI to run Firefox, maybe Thunderbird and keep a non-technical user happy? Thanks!

You'd be pretty much good to go with most distributions, that's actually not too bad a machine. Something like the Xfce edition of Linux Mint 14 should be very zippy indeed on such powerful hardware.

Your only real complication could come from the fact that Intel are assholes. They often do artificial market segmentation through selective feature removal from their processors, and in this case it could affect you. There's a feature called pae that's been standard on pretty much all Intel processors since 1995 or so, EXCEPT for some mobile cpus. Including some Pentium M's. It's such a standard feature that everyone pretty much takes it for granted. If your CPU doesn't support pae most Linux distributions will fail to install.

If your choice of distro fails to install telling you you don't have pae, you can work around it. There are still some distributions that ship with non-pae kernels. http://askubuntu.com/questions/117744/h ... ot-present

You might want to look at Puppy and it's derivatives, from Australia. It runs on really old hardware, and is pretty fast. Might have too much of a learning curve attached though.

Many thanks for the help all!

It looks like Mint with xfce is what it's going to be, once I get that dead battery changed. I only need to take out the main battery (also dead... but not a problem for the moment), ram, hdd and keyboard to get at it... (meh).