http://www.xubuntu.org/
Its based on Ubuntu, but is designed to be a lightweight version, using the XFCE desktop environment instead of the more commonly used Gnome, and requires much less ram, HD space, and CPU power than the full Ubuntu release.
I became interested in trying it out as I've got a very old laptop that only has 128MB ram and a 450MHz CPU which still works perfectly well and has a wireless lan card in the card slot, so I thought I would try and put it to some use rather than leaving it sitting in the cupboard collecting dust. And as it's quite a small laptop (13.1" screen) it' quite portable.
I've had Fedora 4 installed on it since that was released, just to mainly use to fiddle around with Linux, but even that older distro of Fedora is slow to boot and quite slow to use with the Gnome based desktop. Therefore I began searching to see what alternative more lightweight Linux distros existed and became very interested in Xubuntu as I really like the full distro of Ubuntu it's based on.
However there was one potential issue. Looking at the OS specs it only needs 128MB ram to install it, but needs 192MB of ram to run. The laptop only has 128MB of ram (and more cannot be added) so this could have been an issue, but then I read that an alternative version can also be downloaded that only needs 64MB of ram. Result!
So I'm now downloading this alternative version and will be installing it later to see how it performs.If this works and is fast enough this will be a perfect little laptop to use for web browsing and other lightweight tasks.
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