A friend gave me an old laptop of his, and I wanna throw Linux on it, but the problem is, it's pretty low end.  300mhz proc, 196mb RAM, 5gb HD.  It originally had Win 2k on it.  I'm looking for something that will run smoothly on it.  I've got Xubuntu on it right now, but it's not pleasing me so far.  I tried a Knoppix livecd on it, and it ran pretty smooth, but people tell me to not use it installed because of a lack of updates or security upgrades and such.  I was suggested Kanotix for this, because of it's similarity to Knoppix, but I have yet to try because of lack of time.  Any words of wisdom?

I recommend Gentoo Linux, it's my favourite distro
The advantage it has over other distros is that the default package comes with (almost) nothing, so you can choose the software you do want and leave the software you don't want out of it.
It takes some time to get it all right, but once you have installed everything you'll have a system which is totally adapted to your hardware and to your software needs.
If you're stuck at a problem, there's no need to worry. The Gentoo Support Forums are said to be one of the best in the world. When I still had Gentoo, I never had a problem that couldn't be solved with their help.

FREEBSD might work?.. dunno go to http://distrowatch.com/ an have a browse through them but i couldnt recommend high end Graphical ones Arch Linux Might work to with the small window managers

I've tried running Linux on lower end PCs, and it wasn't too much fun. If you tried Xubuntu and didn't like it, that means you don't like the XFCE window manager - I think it's alright, but it's by far and away the most lightweight of the three main ones (KDE, GNOME being the other two).

Knoppix uses KDE as the front-end. If you want to try KDE with ubuntu, try getting Kubuntu. Personally, I wouldn't run newer versions of KDE on anything less than 256MB of RAM, but it's worth a shot.

If you can find it, and older version of RedHat 8/9 might be worth looking into.

You can try Slackware.  I haven't used it in the last few years, but unless the install process has radically changed, it makes it very easy to install a minimal system.

The problem with Gentoo is that, while the result might be great, the installation process is both complicated and likely to take days on a slow machine -- because almost everything is compiled from source as you install it.

No matter what distribution you use, you probably should avoid installing either Gnome or KDE and use some lightweight window manager instead. 

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Originally posted by Adeptus
The problem with Gentoo is that, while the result might be great, the installation process is both complicated and likely to take days on a slow machine -- because almost everything is compiled from source as you install it.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Adeptus
The problem with Gentoo is that, while the result might be great, the installation process is both complicated and likely to take days on a slow machine -- because almost everything is compiled from source as you install it.

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quote:

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No matter what distribution you use, you probably should avoid installing either Gnome or KDE and use some lightweight window manager instead. 

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I don't know why, but I tried both KDE and Gnome on the machine, and they both seem to run MUCH smoother and faster than XFCE.  KDE seemed to be the best, running just about as smooth as Windows on my desktop.

@andrewdodd13

I thought about Redhat, but once again, just haven't had the time or the inclination to do it.  I remember trying it a while back on my last desktop, and was quite pleased with it.

A web-based distro-finder tool recomended SUSE (I don't know how the capitals should be) to me for my old computer. It also recomended some other distros, but listed as their disadvantages that my "computer may be too slow", while it didn't say that for SUSE.

I can't remember what/where the finder tool was/is.

Just a further point about RH, don't go with Fedora past say v2. After that it becomes really bloated.

I can't actually get FC5 to run on this machine but I think that's a USB Card-Drive incompatibility (I had to disable it to install Debian / Ubuntu as it causes the partitioner to stop responding from the constant disk there / disk not there). FC4 was quite bloated, I stopped using it.

I don't know why XFCE isn't working for you. You may need the proprietary drivers for your graphics card to be installed to get the full effect, but I doubt that matters much.

A further to Gentoo, I wouldn't fancy having to install / update on that system. The main point about Gentoo is that everything is compiled from source by emerge, so you have to recompile even for the most minor update.

If you're having real trouble, just stick with Windows 2000, I used to use that before XP and never really found much wrong with it.

Let me see...

For ease of use, especially for former Mac users, I recommend Ubuntu, which does run on slow/low end machines well.

SUSE is very good, especially for slow machines, but obviously you'll want openSUSE, the free open source version.

However, if your machine is not old, just low end, you want a distro that is extremely easy to use, all heads should turn to Freespire.

I tried SUSE once on a virtual machine but it wasn't too much fun
It ran terribly slow compared to other distro's (also in VMware) and I deleted the VM within a few days, while I usually try for a week or two before I delete it.

I'd say try out a few distro's, have some fun, learn something while you're at it and make a choice afterwards