Why would this warrant a post I hear you ask. Well, with the notable exception of Knoppix I have never been able to run a live cd on my wife's laptop until now. The word 'run' is a bit optimistic actually, a closer approximation to what occurred would be - crawling uphill through newly laid concrete in a gale force headwind, but never mind, the point is that it actually produced a desktop and an internet connection and nothing else (except Knoppix) has ever got that far. The point of this post then is just to let the dev's know that they are definitely doing something right if they can make this happen on that machine.

I really don't know why her machine is so 'resistant' to live cd's it is not that old, it has 256Mb of sdr Ram and a 1GHz pentium 3 processor but it just generally doesn't like them. (She runs windows xp on it and although slow it is nowhere near as slow as when running from a live cd). As an example we clicked the desktop icon for Firefox. Nothing happened so we forgot about it. About 10 mins later a tiny little window appeared at the top left hand corner of the screen - it was the start of a Firefox window!! It never did complete, but it shows you how slow the system is.

I am not looking for answers to this btw, I intend to buy a new laptop shortly and she can then use mine, but I was so amazed that I have at last found a live cd that works with it (knoppix excepted).

Well done Mandriva.


[moved from Installing Mandriva by spinynorman]

I was trying to find something that ran on my wife's laptop without problems - ain't happened yet. Her desktop also has ATI graphics, so would have been easier if was NVIDIA.

Well you could give Knoppix a go. Not that it is something you really want to install it is more of a recovery medium but it is very good at running on unusual hardware.

Tried knoppix before in the past, it was OK. I tend to only use the LiveCD's to check that hardware is OK - but then sometimes you need to install before you find one bit that doesn't work. Not all LiveCD's have wireless configured, but they're getting better at it.

actually i think if you were to try one of the amller distros youd be better off. PCLOS or even DSL.

PCSLOS has a "mini me" distro that will run perfectly from your wifes PC.
Better yet would be MCNL. we Give away dozens of pc's to churches and small schools with MCNL loaded on them, and they just rock!

Even the 500MHZ pcs do well.

BUT one thing we DO is make sure that they ALL have at LEAST 512MB of ram.

PCLOS, MCNL is you want MDV, if you just want Linux DSL will run on almost ANYTHING!