9.04 system craches

[vt_skier]

I am new to linux and installed 9.04 on an old HP laptop. It has 256MB of Ram and a 20G hard drive. I installed to the whole disk thereby intentionally wiping our windows in the process. The system boots from the hard drive but then freezes shortly thereafter. The mouse pad works, but that's about it. If I am real quick I can get an application started but it too will freeze. I downloaded another copy and burned another image disk with the same results. I even tried 8.04 but that wouldn't completely install.
I gave up and loaded PCLinux (whole disk) and that works on the laptop. I would like to use Ubuntu since it is widely supported. One thought is the RAM, however before I buy more memory for an old laptop I would want to know if that is really the problem.

[running_rabbit07]

Try Xubuntu (http://www.xubuntu.com/get). The system requirements are a lot lower than Ubuntu which makes it run a lot smoother. You will still have all the great programs. I believe the system recommendations for Ubuntu say 512MB RAM while Xubuntu (http://www.xubuntu.com/get) is 192MB.

I recently had Xubuntu (http://www.xubuntu.com/get) 8.04LTS installed on a 2002 model HP Omnibook and it ran great until I upgraded to 9.04 when I started having major graphics issues. During the short time I had 8.10 on it, it ran great, but I would recommend the 8.04 being it is the long term support release.

Everywhere you see the word Xubuntu (http://www.xubuntu.com/get), I put iin a hyper-link that will take you to there site. Let us know how it works out for you.:)

Edit: Be sure to burn the ISO at about 4x, it'll help make sure you have a good ISO.

[vt_skier]

Try Xubuntu (http://www.xubuntu.com/get). The system requirements are a lot lower than Ubuntu which makes it run a lot smoother. You will still have all the great programs. I believe the system recommendations for Ubuntu say 512MB RAM while Xubuntu (http://www.xubuntu.com/get) is 192MB.

I recently had Xubuntu (http://www.xubuntu.com/get) 8.04LTS installed on a 2002 model HP Omnibook and it ran great until I upgraded to 9.04 when I started having major graphics issues. During the short time I had 8.10 on it, it ran great, but I would recommend the 8.04 being it is the long term support release.

Everywhere you see the word Xubuntu (http://www.xubuntu.com/get), I put iin a hyper-link that will take you to there site. Let us know how it works out for you.:)

Edit: Be sure to burn the ISO at about 4x, it'll help make sure you have a good ISO.
Ronnie, Thanks for your reply. I still couldn't get xbuntu 8.04LTS to run from live CD or load on the HP Omnibook. However, I know the disks I made for that as well as the ones I made for ubuntu 9.04 are good since I was able to run both in the live CD mode on my Toshiba Satellite A55-S326 with 1GB Ram.
The HP omnibook vt6200 that I am trying to work with has a Pentium 4, 1.6G processor with 256MB of Ram. It was a cast away from my daughter-inlaw with a dead battery. I wanted to use it to play with linux without any risks to my Toshiba laptop with XP Pro, or my desktop with XP Pro. My son, who is an IT manager will see if they have any old PC 2100 DDR laptop memory around that I could try. I wouldn't want to buy any in case that's not the problem. I tried downloading 8.04 directly on the HP Omnibook, but I couldn't get the PCLinux software that I now have on it to burn an image disk. I am visiting my son in Boston this weekend so I will see if he had any luck finding memory.
Marty