[sf-lug] distro for an ageing laptop

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

> If I may,
> I believe Alex is suffering from the misapprehension that Ubuntu is no
> longer supporting i386 aka 32 bit versions but I have informed him in
> private email that this is not the case.

Aha!  OK, that makes sense.

Alex, if you want to load Ubuntu Desktop Edition for IA32 onto your
ThinkPad T41, you certainly can, though GNOME3 (even without the Unity
shell) is rather heavy-weight for it (oink, oink).  XFCE4 is a bit less
bad in that area, but still heavy.  LXDE, which you were looking at, is
quite a bit lighter, as is the Moksha Desktop variant of the
Enlightenment DE provided by Bodhi Linux.

> I also offered him alternatives to his planned 7 hour download of
> Knoppix.

Knoppix is terrific as a live CD for a variety of uses.  However, it's 
really _not_ very good as an installed system, as it was never designed
for installed-system use and ongoing package maintenance.  Certainly its
LXDE or Openbox flavours would run well enough on a 1.5GB RAM T41,
though.  Great for checking out the system and demos.