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Hi folks, I might be preaching to the converted here but I thought I'd mention my experience with Vector Linux this afternoon. Basically a customer of mine asked me to sort out his old IBM laptop for a relative. Now this laptop was getting on a bit, it has 256MB Ram and a P3-733Mhz CPU. It wasn't up to the job of running Gnome and Xubuntu was too slow too (I mean painfully slow). So my only alternatives were to either stick Windows 98 back on there (it had a Windows 98 licence) or install a basic minimal Linux system. As I was running out of time I decided reluctantly to go for the Windows option. I got Windows installed but then found that the video drivers wouldn't install without DirectX 7, Windows Update wouldn't even load (never mind not providing updates anymore) and Firefox 3.0 won't work on anything less than Windows 2000. In the end I gave that up as a bad job (I presume I would have spent hours digging out old software which would work on it) so I tried Damn Small Linux. It booted up okay and I even got it installed but I found that it doesn't have dpkg or apt (I thought it was supposed to be Debian based too!) and the sound didn't work so I gave up on that. I then remembered reading about a recent version of Vector Linux in Linux Format. Now it's been a good 8 years since I looked at Vector Linux but I figured I'd give it a shot. I downloaded the Vector Linux 5.9 Light Edition (which includes Fluxbox and LXDE). A reboot later and I was installing it. Now I forgot that Vector Linux was based on Slackware and my god things haven't changed, it reminded me of when I first tried Linux back in the mid 90's when I tried installing Slackware. Suffice to say I managed to get it installed (it was fairly straightforward, not as easy as Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora etc) but easy enough anyway. About 30 mins later everything was installed and I was browsing the internet at a decent speed. The default browser is Opera (which was a surprise to me) but sound worked, Flash worked, Abiword and GNumeric worked and my god it was quick (it seemed as nippy as Ubuntu on my dual core machine). I returned the laptop this evening and my customer was really happy. He has a laptop running Vista which runs dead slow (not enough memory, slow CPU and bogged down with junkware) and this notebook runs rings around it. He did mention that he had heard about Linux and that it was good. So the moral of the story is, if you're looking for a lightweight distro for an old machine then give Vector Linux a try. Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html