2006/9/6, Mrugesh Karnik mrugeshkarnik@gmail.com:
Hi,
My neighbour is sick of his Windows 98 and now wants Linux on his desktop machine too, after using Kubuntu on his laptop. His is an old P3 566MHz computer with 96MB RAM.
I would suggest Debian. The minimum requirement is 24MB RAM and 256MB harddisk for base system.
I have installed it on my P2 266MHz (but I have 256MB RAM) system and it is running superbly.
He needs to play videos, mplayer will do. For music, I need suggestions
for a lightweight mp3 player. He needs something WinAmp-ish. Amarok, he loves, but its too heavy. I hate xmms and I heard bmp is not being developed these days..
For this configuration console based players will be good. I would suggest mp3blaster (but it won't be a substitute for gui and if he is a newbie it won't be good to suggest). It has got some good interface but cannot use mouse though.
I have a screenshot here
I'm thinking about trying out XFCE and if it seems heavy, Fluxbox will
be the default.
I'm running WindowMaker and it is quite good and easy.
Now the question about the distro arises, because I need all the above
mentioned packages in the repository of that particular distro. Also, the packages need to be compiled for i686 rather than pentium4, like Fedora is these days, if i'm not mistaken..
Debian has 686 kernel for sure but dunno about packages for sure.
Regards Praveen