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

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