[Gerbalblaste]

I recently purchased an old Dell Inspiron 3000 Laptop for $25 and i would like to put linux on it. I am New to linux and am trying to find a linux distro that would run well on it. all i want to do with this laptop is word process and listen to music.

• System: Dell Inspiron 3000

• Microprocessor: Intel Pentium 200 MHz w/ internal math coprocessor

• PC Card: 2 PCI controller Texas Instruments PCI 1131 CardBus controller

• Memory: 32 MB SDRAM (Max. 144 MB)

• Harddrive: 20 GB

• Audio: Crystal 4237B sound card (Sound Blaster Pro-compatible voice and music functions)

• Monitor: 12.1" builtin

• Video: NeoMagic 2160 64-bit (128-bit hardware-accelerated) PCI card

• Mouse: Synaptics Touch Pad

• Main Battery: lithium ion (max. 3.3 hours)

• Disk drive: 3.5" floppy (removable)

• CD-ROM: external usb

• Other: Infrared IrDA 1.1 port, USB port (1)

• Original OS: Windows 95b

[CouchMaster]

Two obversations,
32MB ram isn't much, and can you boot with the external CD drive?
If so you can run some 'Live' Linux CDs and see how they will work.

[Gerbalblaste]

1. for $15 i can add 64 mb of ram (is it worth it?)
2. i will find out about the cd drive in 2 days (i loaned it to a friend)

Any suggestions about beginner friendly distros?

[CouchMaster]

$15 for 64MB of ram sounds good to me! (Just make sure it works)
And you need to make sure you can boot with your CD drive - If you can't it means you are going to have to try using boot floppies and it's going to get frustrating really quick.
You might also do a search for 'laptop linux' and see which distros you find there.

[Whiteskin]

Yeah... you can run linux. Easily. I was, for a long time, running a D266XT, which isn't much faster. Only thing you need to watch for is big GUI envrionments. Stay away from gnome, gnome apps/kde,kde-apps like the plague. They take up massive amounts of resources on a small box like that.

[Gerbalblaste]

i prefer a gui, i don't like using a text only interface.
Is there any low resource gui that i can use?

[CouchMaster]

You might be able to find your laptop here,
http://www.linux-laptop.net/
and what distros are on it...

[Gerbalblaste]

they use redhat 5.1 and also suggest slackware. i did find a Website giving instructions on slackware 10 installation on this laptop, but its way over my head.

[Insp3cta]

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/