suggestions for my aging laptop

[papaschtroumpf]

I have an old Toshiba Satellite 2805-S201 laptop currently running windows XP. It takes forever to boot on XP and runs really slow making it a pain to use. In addition I want to re-use the XP license for another box.

 

The hardware is relatively linux friendly (for example I there are report of being able to use the lucent modem even though it's a winmodem) but it's old and not too powerfull.

 

# Intel Celeron 650 MHz

# 192MB PC100 RAM

# Built-in 3.5" Floppy Disk Drive

# 6GB Hard Disk Drive 4200 rpm

# 8X DVD ROM

# 13.3" TFT Active-Matrix Display

# S3 Savage/IX M7 Graphics Controller with 8MB SDRAM with TV out

# Yamaha YMF754B-R sound chip

# Integrated V.90 56K Xircom (Intel) modem (Lucent chipset)

# Integrated 10/100 Ethernet LAN (Intel Ethernet Pro 100)

# USB 1

# PCMCIA

 

The laptop would be mostly used for web browsing and playing media, and will be used also by my wife who is a windows only user, so the GUI needs to be friendly to a previous windows user. I also want to be able to use it for VoIP calling and instant messaging (skype and Gaim will do).

 

The requirements seem to fit well a "desktop" distro like Mandriva and KDE but I'm afraid it's going to be dog slow on the old hardware. The 4200 rpm harddrive is not conducive to fast boot times, which is really something I'd like to get.

 

Some of the exposures here are:

- the HD is too small to do a dual boot as an experiment, so I'd like to get it "right" the first time.

- I would really like to retain the TV out functionnality so I can play media to my TV: under windows you press the the Fn and 5 keys simultaneously to switch between the integrated LCD and the TV out. Does that mean that it's handled in the BIOS or am I going to loose it in linux?

- I currently run a motorola WG825 wireless card running WPA with AES encryption. I'm getting conflicting reports as whether ndiswrappers works with that card, and I have not yet seen any instructions on how to set up WPA and AES encryption in linux.

 

 

Any comments or distro suggestions would be welcome.

[papaschtroumpf]

partially answering some of my questions: there seems to be a set of linux tools for the toshiba laptop to manage the Fn+number hot keys: http://www.buzzard.me.uk/toshiba/index.html

 

Does running a different windows manager (like iceWM) under Mandriva make sense?

[arctic]

if you want something that is quite similar to windows and you need a real lightweight option, then i suggest you wun icewm with mandy (if you want to use mandy). you can copy the windows look very easily with icewm. and if you need icons on the desktop, how about some rox apps?

 

an alternative might be beatrix, a very well done distro for the basic needs, using gnome, a customized and very light kernel (other kernels are available online). you can run it as live cd or install it on your lappy. and you can install debian or ubuntu packages if you want.

 

but i 'd say, try tested and well known mandy first. just do a custom install and you will be fine i guess.