VLC and Chrome on old installation

[sirbow2]

hi,

i have a laptop with 1.5ghz pentium M and 512mb ram, 855GM Integrated Graphics. i couldnt get 10.04 to work(live cd stuck at the background image, no icons) so i got 8.04.4 LTS since it was only most recently dropped.
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/ubuntu-release-cycle.png

how can i get a newer version of VLC like 1.1.1 instead of 0.86 to work on 8.04.4 LTS? how can i get chrome?

or should i try 9.10?

thanks

[QIII]

9.10 has reached EOL and won't do you much good.

Did you try Xubuntu when you tried 10.04? It is a much lighter distro as far as desktop environment and may work better for you than Ubuntu.

With the arrival of Lubuntu into the "official" Ubuntu family, you might give that a try.

10.04 is an LTS and still has quite some time left for support.

There is also an Ubuntu based distro called Bodhi that runs very well on older machines.

I have an old PIII laptop with 512M running just fine on it.

Whatever you choose (I'm not pushing you one way or the other), you may have difficulty watching media with VLC with your specs. I'm not sure how the GPU and CPU would share duties. It's been a while since I used it, but I think VLC is CPU heavy.