On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 8:44 AM, Terry Duell <tduell@iinet.net.au> wrote:
If you're concerned about performance, choose a distribution that lets you install a minimal operating system and then add packages to it. For example, Debian can be installed this way.
Yes, that would be a good approach. I have been looking at Mint and Mint-Debian, but really haven't spent enough time with any of them thus far.
I have a Panasonic toughbook I use for Ham radio in the field. It is a 1.4 GHZ processor and has 1.5GB of RAM and a 64GB IDE SSD, I am running Xubuntu on it and it runs quite fast, certainly much smoother then XP that came on it when I bought it. I cant say how much of a difference the SSD made as I swapped it in the same time I installed Linux. Xubuntu isnt as light as doing a minimal install of debian but it is much lighter then Mint and being Ubuntu based it all just worked for me including the touch screen, although I did have to make the touch screen calibration persistent across reboots. YMMV Mark -- Mark "Pockets" Clohesy Mob Phone: (+61) 406 417 877 Email: hiddensoul@twistedsouls.com G-Talk: mark.clohesy@gmail.com - GNU/Linux.. Linux Counter #457297 "I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code" "Linux is user friendly...its just selective about who its friends are" "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a V8 station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" "The difference between e-mail and regular mail is that computers handle e-mail, and computers never decide to come to work one day and shoot all the other computers"