Puppy

Downloaded and installed Puppy Linux on yet another ancient acquisition. This time it's a desktop with a 1GHz AMD Duron with 256MB of RAM in it. My first intention was to install the latest Xubuntu 8.10 (like Puppy, it's another light Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu) in it but that had failed. Every time I tried installing, I get thrown out to some command prompt which I had no idea what it is. As I am quite a Linux newbie, I have no whatsoever skill to solve that issue. Googling did not give me any solution either.

However, Googling for a light Linux pointed me to the Puppy direction and the latest version 4.1.2 being less than 100MB was totally amazing. I did install Ubuntu 8.04 a week or so earlier but due to slow performance, I tried this instead. Successfully did the installation two nights ago and tried it briefly early this morning. As the desktop will be primarily used by my dad, I had set the screen resolution to 800 x 600 for easy reading. The monitor is just 14". :P

Everything really required is installed together using the download image which was burnt to a CD. Such as word processing, image editing, spreadsheet and browser. All are of the lighter genre, I have read. Tried the browser (but can't remember what it's called) with Google Reader and Gmail. Both ran fine but were slightly sluggish though still useable. I would think that is due to the processing power of the grand ancient and not to blame on Puppy.

Another alternative light Linux worth considering is TinyMe. Was weighing between Puppy and TinyMe but ended up with Puppy. Maybe I will talk more about Puppy in the future but no promises. :P