[wilson1973]

Hi guys I live in the Uk I have a fairly old pc which I run Xp on, I would like another operating system on my pc so I can dual boot,the reason being I want a Linux based OS as I hear they are fairly safe in terms of virus and this OS would be used by my young son for playing on line games and watching clips on Youtube,I like to feel confident that when he has his own OS to use he's not fowling up my side of the pc.
We previously had Ubuntu 10.10 but it got wiped of ages ago when my pc went down,he seemed quite happy with it,I just thought I would ask is there anything else out there that would be quite good and be able to work on my pc which isn't that powerful or is Ubuntu still good for the simple things that he wants to do.My pc stats are below
The OS needs to be a free of charge

AMD Sempron 2600 +
1.83 ghz
512 Mb of ram

[arochester]

1) I have a similar computer. I maxed out the RAM to (I think) 3 Gb. If you can economically do that it might help.

2) I would stay away from Gnome and use Xfce instead. If you were happy with Ubuntu go for Xubuntu. Xfce distros are listed here: http://xfce.org/download/distros

[TerryNet]

You could stick with Ubuntu 10.10 since that worked for you. You may like (or not) the latest 11.10; the new GUI doesn't play nice with my seven year old laptop, so I am still using 10.10 and thinking of trying Linux Mint.

If you weren't satisfied with the performance of 10.10 then by all means try arochester's suggestions. Lubuntu is another lighter weight Ubuntu.

[InterKnight]

Yet another lightweight distro based on Ubuntu is wattOS.

I actually read about wattOS today in an artcile which was part of a Linux Journal e-mail newsletter which I receive on a weekly basis. I am actually downloading the ISO to test it out in a virtual machine right now.

Since it is Ubuntu based, you should have access to all of the packages in the Ubuntu repositories.

It seems like your system would be perfect for this operating system.

Take care, and best wishes.