Ubuntu or Mint or something else for an old Dell 6000? Quick recommendation please!

[nitsuj3580]

I have the following laptop that is laying around. I'd like to throw some form of Linux on it. I know I can keep trying different Live CDs but was curious if anyone had one in particular he/she would recommend given the following hardware specs.

Dell Inspiron 6000 D Specs:
1.6 GHz Intel Pentium M 730 (Sonoma), 533MHz FSB and PCIe x16 chipset
15.4 inch WSXGA+ LCD Panel (Samsung)
2 GB DDR2 400 MHz ram
64 MB ATi Mobility Radeon X300
Intel 2200 b/g internal wireless card

Thanks!

 

[lxskllr]

Any should work ok. Your best bet is to try a few, and see what you like. I'm partial to Debian based distros. Xubuntu, Ubuntu, and Mint would be near the top of my list. Bodhi is pretty nifty, and one of the few that ships E17 as the default window manager.

 

[nitsuj3580]

Any should work ok. Your best bet is to try a few, and see what you like. I'm partial to Debian based distros. Xubuntu, Ubuntu, and Mint would be near the top of my list. Bodhi is pretty nifty, and one of the few that ships E17 as the default window manager.

Thanks, do you think this hardware has enough to run either the latest Mint or Ubuntu 12.04 with decent performance?

 

[lxskllr]

Yea, that should run either of them fine. There's lighter distros you could pick if you wanted to maximize performance, but it isn't essential.

 

[Jodell88]

It isn't going to run Unity or Gnome-shell that well at all. I have a laptop with similar specs. Go with Xubuntu or a mint version with xfce installed. You'll be better off.

 

[Netopia]

I've got the exact same laptop... and I've not been able to part with it even though it's old. One thing I did do was to upgrade the CPU to 2.1GHz. You can get a 2.2GHz part, but the premium for that 100 MHz difference is extreme.

Take the opportunity to clean out all the guts while you have it apart. You end up with about 25% more horsepower. Also, with the ATI card as discrete GPU, you've got a better chance running things more smoothly than with any IGP of that day.

I am using Ubuntu 10.10 and it runs nice and smooth... but there are plenty of other distros out there to try that should run perfectly fine.

 

[unokitty]

Not as sophisticated as Mint but lean and fast is the Puppy Linux LiveCD.

If you have the time, you might want to download and burn the ISO.

http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%20and%20Getting%20Started.htm

Uno