It really depends on what you're looking for and you level of experience.
The lightest thing you are going to get would be a source based distro, however, if you're not up to building the distro for your needs, Xubuntu would work out well for you.
Personally, I highly recommend source over binary distros because of the performance gains, but, it all depends on what you're trying to get out of the experience.
My best recommendation would be to just work with various distros and see what you like best. I spent years playing with various distros before I determined that I am a Gentoo guy. Even at that, I still play with plenty of others working out bugs, fine tuning, etc.
Ultra fast, cheap offshore web hosting at MasterClick Hosting
Current special for UbuntuForums members: Half off hosting for 6 months with coupon code UBUNTUFORUMS
Bodhi is pretty nice. It's very fast but can take some time getting used to. E17 is so different than other guis. You can make it look really nice though.
Without exact specs its hard to say, but an XP-era machine isn't likely to perform well with any modern desktop environment.
Pretty much any mainstream distro is fully customizable, you just have to learn how to customize it.
You don't need to keep swapping distros if you just want to try some different desktops. The ubuntu repositories and PPAs have just about every DE out there. Install a few and see which one works well on your hardware, then spend some time customizing the look. This is ultimately better than jumping through fifteen distros hoping someone shares your sense of aesthetics.
Are there any other Linux Operating Systems which offers installation in windows using "WUBI.exe?" aside from Ubuntu??
My understanding is that Wubi is a technology created by Canonical and I am not aware of any other Linux distributions that provide the same, except for Linux Mint who cloned Wubi:
http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php
Linux installed in on a Windows partition may cause some issues. However if you are just looking for an installer that one can install Linux from a Windows partition, but have a separate partition, then you can get Debian from http://goodbye-microsoft.com and get a loader which will download the distribution and install it dual boot, or completely erase Windows.
It is your choice.
As for a light distribution...
All Linux distributions are light, but it is the desktop environment that is variable in speeds. If you already have Ubuntu installed, you can install a lighter desktop environment. I prefer Gnome, but for speed, a desktop environment like openbox is blazingly fast. Openbox is a window manager and not a desktop environment, but it is very minimal, and will improve your speed considerably. Check out http://xwinman.org to learn more.
I am not so familiar with WUBI.exe.
But, IMHO, it is not so difficult to install linux distribution in a filesystem file in NTFS/FAT32 partition and boot it.
It can be done by modifying a little in init in initramfs. If necessary, ntfs/fat32 modules should be incorporated into the initramfs.
Only the following two things are necessary; 1) Modify init to make it mount the ntfs/fat32 partition containing the filesystem file which is to become / partition and mount the filysystem file on /root before chroot. 2) incorporate the necessary modules to mount ntfs/fat32 partition.
For example in debian,
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.p...=69126#p391034
Last edited by kiyop; October 13th, 2012 at 02:24 PM.
OpenBox: Debian Wheezy, Sid, Snowlinux, Aptosid, Siduction, Crunchbang, Ubuntu, Mint, ZorinOS, OS4, Arch, Manjaro, Mageia, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSuSE, PCLinuxOS, Sabayon, Slackware, Win XP/7
http://kiyoandkei.bbs.fc2.com/
I have to say gentoo because you want a lightweight distro.
But gentoo can be as lightweight or as heavy as you need it, it's really easy to use and anyone who says otherwise is well.. just won't get into it. Everything is really well documented and if you want to try out zfs or btrfs you can't beat gentoo because you compile from source.
One thing about use flags you will change it quite often and more likely for every package because each package is different.
If your not up for that you can use sabayon, remove kde and all the useless bloat and install lxde or xfce. Better yet, openbox.
Bookmarks