I've recently obtained an old IBM Thinkpad 600 laptop that I wish to install a Linux distro (preferable Ubuntu) on. It's armed with a meaty pentium 2 processor (~250mhz) and a whopping big 5gb harddrive. I'm unsure of its ram content as yet as it currently has a win95 partition that of course has been immobilised thanks to the original owner's lack of anti-virus knowledge, and I don't beleive it has enough RAM to even boot a liveCD. I'm guessing it has either 128 or 256 megabytes, because those are the amount this model has stock.
Which Ubuntu distro should I use? Standard (gnome), Kubuntu (kde) or Xubuntu (xfce)? I'm not going to be playing games on it (cept nethack , rather just word-processing (probably not OO as it is a ram hog, instead abiword), and I'd rather that I didn't end up with the minimalist Xfce desktop, but as far as I know that is the best option speedwise. Should I even bother with Ubuntu or should I try another distro?
Would it be possible to even run the standard Ubuntu install (gnome) at all on this slug? The reason I haven't tried the three variants is that 8.10 is about to come out, and to waste 1.5 gigs of bandwidth only to re-download the OS again seems wasteful of my 2gb a month allowance.
Finally, I'd like to congratulate the amazing work the Linux teams have done on this amazing operating system. If anyone says Linux sucks, its because they've never used it before and/or they have stared at the subliminal messages in V***a for more than half an hour. Vista was my turning point. Ram-hogging snail-speeding blue-plastic interfaces don't attract me, neither do their anti-freedom features.
EDIT: Install instructions for 7.04, are they the same for 8.04 / 8.10?
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