LXDE Forums

I just downloaded and burned debian-live-502-i386-lxde-desktop.iso to a CD-R. I was hoping to find a Linux distro I like to run on my 10 year old HP Omnibook XE2-DB (333 MHz Pentium II, 256MB RAM, 4.3GB HD, Silicon Motion Inc. Lynx-E video card, 800x600 LCD display). I've been through several Linux distro Live-CDs, and they all have issues.

After the slowest boot up of any live CD I've tried so far, I finally ended up with a cursor in the center of the screen that has 2 shadows, one shadow touching the cursor and slightly to the right and down, and another shadow further to the right and down perhaps 3 cursor widths away.

Additionally, I was sorry to see that there's no obvious way to switch to a left-handed mouse. Was this part of the "simplification" process?

Is there a solution to my cursor + 2 shadows problem? Does LXDE understand left-handed?

I think I'm about to throw away another plastic disc; I've already got enough coasters. The land fill loves me.

Right now I've got Damn Small Linux frugal-installed on said ancient notebook but am thinking of some kind of Poor Man's Install or Pivot Install of Knoppix if I can resolve some problems with Knoppix that don't belong in this post.

you should invest in some CDRWs
i found some that are like 10 years old and i have been using them for livecd testing because i was tired of wasting cds.
have you tried SliTaz?
it claims that it can work in as little as 16mb ram, but it runs fine with 256.
except for me, apparently nobody else in the world, i have some issues with the browser closing by itself, like in the latest puppy linux.
if you just want to use the internet, and dont care much for the other functionality, http://browserlinux.com/ may work for you. it works great for me, unless i try to add too many extra programs. but it comes with firefox 3.5.5. and flash 10, it is based off puppylinux 4.3.1 but does away with all the applications, and fixes the crashing of the browser that is the plague of puppy linux.
but just one CDRW and you could try them all. no more trashing cds. the cdrw i use for browser linux even has its data layer flaking off around the edges, but the data only takes up a small portion of the center.

i know what you mean though. it is a very long search to find a distro that even runs on 256mb ram nowadays.
if flash player/etc are not important to you, or you know how to install packages for slackware(i dont) you should totally check out "Mitrax"
i have had zero problems with it, besides not knowing how to get packages. it looks like the guy was going for a win95 lookalike.
http://www.mitrax.net/ it comes with opera web browser and mplayer, and i dont know how to install anything like flash, java, apps, anything, but it is the most stable distro i have tried. SliTaz i like very much, if i could get it stabilized.
oh, looks like i put some topics that don't belong in this post, like.. i cant install knoppix to hd, and i donotlike DSL. anyways, those are some recommendations, and http://tinycorelinux.com/ as well, but of all 3, mitrax is the most stable for me.
if your laptop touchpad has a scroll wheel section, some distros won't use it properly, especially if they use xvesa or something like that.
i am in the same boat you're in, downloading loads of livecds, testing them and they dont all live up to their claims.
some claim to be 'lightweight' and then ask me for 1gb of RAM.
i also like Antix, but it did ask me for a little over 2gb of hard drive to install on.
it should run on your system.
Antix may be my favorite, since SliTaz closes the browser on me. i'm not sure which ones autorecognized the wifi, if your old computer uses wifi.
so, i cant help you with your debian live lxde problems, i have my own problems with it. i can't even find where to set up my IP on it. . but i posted to recommend to you the best live cds i have tested lately., and cd-rw's, and if you can boot from USB, you can save all those CDs by using Unetbootin and a flash drive, and the iso files.
Antix, Mitrax, SliTaz, Tinycore.
Antix and SliTaz are the most feature-packed, and good looking, and tinycore has a package manager too. i liked its looks but i forget what problem it gave me. Mitrax looks kinda like windows 95, but never gave me an error message or froze. they are ALL better than DSL, unless you can't install packages, then DSL might beat Mitrax because DSL has the Aim, IRC, all that, even though they are text based. and a package manager.
i was testing them all with a 1.30ghz celeron with less thann 256 mb ram usable, but cpu speed isnt as important with these distros as RAM is. and i never tried them with over 2gb of storage because no hard drive, just 2g flash drive.

Yeah, you're right jeditalian, with over 400 Linux distros out there, I should use CD-RWs.

I was hoping LXDE would be light enough to let me get a couple of other packages running on my living fossil notebook. I fantasize that I'll be able to get my D-Link DWL-G630 wifi card which sits in a PCMCIA slot to work with some Linux distro.

Rather than let it gather dust, I was hoping to get that old notebook to run Linux and wifi. Wifi cards that sit in PCMCIA slots seem to be more hell than they're worth in Linux. I read a post elsewhere by a guy who has 3 different wifi cards and can't get any of them to work in Linux. Ethernet cards don't appear to be anywhere near as difficult as wifi cards to get running in Linux.

My ancient Silicon Motion graphics card won't run flash. I wanted to make the old notebook into an overweight netbook without flash. I just want something that I don't keep any personal data on and that I can use at wifi hotspots.

I really liked the look of Puppy, but I couldn't get rid of a dark vertical bar on the right side of the desktop. I got lots of bad advice in the Puppy forum about how to fix that. I thought it had something to do with my old video card that only has 2MB of RAM, but I finally tried the Puppy Live CD on a 3 year old notebook that has a dual core processor, 2GB of RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 video card with 64MB of RAM and had the same problem. I think I also couldn't set the mouse to be left-handed under Puppy; it's been a while so I don't remember for sure. I tossed the Puppy CD.

I hoped that I could get Xubuntu + LXDE going on that notebook. I haven't tried Lubuntu yet. The Xubuntu documents say it'll run on as little as 192MB of RAM, but the Live CD definitely won't. When I start up the Xubuntu Live CD, press F1 then F2, the CD says it needs 384MB of RAM to run Live.

I like the Knoppix v.5 Live CD, but I find Knoppix v.6 to be user-hostile--it doesn't seem to have PCMCIA support and I don't see how to set the mouse to be left-handed. I think about trying to do some kind of HD Install of Knoppix v.5, then installing LXDE and uninstalling KDE. With only 4.3GB of HD space, I've got to be careful about which packages I use.

Anyway, I'll look at browserlinux, mitrax and Slitaz. I think I'll skip Tinycore because I've got Damn Small Linux frugal-installed on the HD now and have too much trouble trying to get peripherals to work with DSL. I'll pick up some CD-RWs this weekend at a swap meet, then check out your much-appreciated suggestions.

I used to have Window$ 2000 installed on a 40GB HD on this notebook, but the HD crashed weeks after its warranty expired. Even though the notebook is maxed out at 256MB of RAM, W2K ran OK on the notebook. My wifi card installed painlessly and worked great in W2K. After the 40 gig drive crashed, I installed W2K on the 4.3GB drive but it was a real dog due to disk thrashing--I had a swap file and hibernate file and the disk just ran all the time but it took forever for W2K to do anything.

A used 10GB to 40GB HD costs about as much where I now live as my used notebook would sell for in the States, so I keep hoping to find a Linux distro that'll run on the ol' notebook and support my wifi card.