philo said:
Your machine is either underpowered
I'm hoping Bill will include hardware specs (CPU speed
and amount of RAM) in his answer. So others can better
understand what is going on.
*******
For recent Linux distros, the developers have been more
or less promising "death to old computers", by raising
the resource level needed for Linux. A user can battle back
a bit, by using XFCE rather than Gnome or KDE. And perhaps
look for an Xorg server setup with slightly less "plugin"
material in it. For example, I think some version of
Knoppix might have XFCE, and possibly Linux Mint has that
as an option.
A reasonable starting point now, might be 512MB of RAM.
There are some things you can tune on Linux.
And if you want to see an environment with a lot of
control in that regard, that would be Gentoo. With
Gentoo, I could set up an environment with PulseAudio
completely removed. So if something needs to be tuned,
Gentoo is how you do it. I even set up a distcc server,
just so I could compile faster while doing experiments
on it. (Gentoo is compiled from source, and the time
to build your desktop from source is around 10 hours.
Once the environment is built and works to your
satisfaction, then you stop compiling stuff.)
With Bill's computer collection, he could make
a room full of distcc machines
Gentoo is how Kaspersky rescue disc is constructed,
and it's an example of a distro pared down for
distribution on the Internet. (Lots of executables
removed, to make the ISO file smaller.) And it's
relatively light-weight, because they need the RAM
to waste for their AV scanner
If you want a lightweight window manager, you can
use XWM that comes with Xorg. It doesn't get much
lighter weight than that. And it also doubles as
an "education" in what a Windows Manager is. When
XWM is killed, you can't move the windows around
the screen. When you run another copy of XWM, the
windows get their decorations around the edges again,
and you can move the windows again if you want. And
XWM would use less resources than things like
Gnome or KDE.
There's a lot of "space" to explore in Linux. If
you have the curiosity.
Also, if you don't like how the Ubuntu stuff is
working these days, you can try starting with
a Ubuntu server version. Which is more or less
Debian, with no Windows Manager and Xserver (Xorg)
at all. Then, you install component parts, like
install Xorg, run XWM, and then once you have a
GUI, add whatever you need on top of that. I did
that here, in a VM, to show that Ubuntu doesn't
always mean a "pig" of a distro.
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/9074/u1110svr.gif
And a person might ask "what motivated you to do that" ?
Was it a love of Linux ? No. It was the Ubuntu folks
switching to tiles for their interface, and also
removing the ability to disable the tiles. For
that particular distro, I wanted to see whether
that silly shit could be disabled, and that's where
the idea of starting with Ubuntu Server and building
it up from there came from. It was my wish to return
control to the users. That was my only motivation.
Paul