Really old laptop

[tenmm57]

I have a 2007 Gateway MX6959 laptop. It has an Intel core 2 T5500 processor, 2 gigs of ram, Intel mobile 945 GM GPU, and 320 HDD. I installed Lubuntu with LXDE desktop and it was buggy. Tried to change the panel preferences and it just wiped all icons off the panel. Then some of the icons it wiped off weren't listed when I tried to add them back. I was going to try to install antiX but I thought I'd ask first to see if it would run on my old machine.

[Gerhard S.]

why not. give it a try. mine x64 has after reached desktop 540 mb ram. after 1 website in firefox 950 mb used ram. cpu usage 1~2 %

[chrispop99]

It will run OK with the limitation being the RAM.

I would advise using the 32-bit version, and after installation use the 4.9 kernel.

Chris

[anticapitalista]

Use antiX

[foonominal]

Try anti-x. Maybe try swapping firefox for a lighter browser after you install: mainstream modern browsers are VERY ram hungry. (FFi s much better than Chrome though..)

If anti-x doesn't work for you, try Puppy or Damn Small Linux - they're even lighter (but at a real cost in usability.)

And MX19 is very lightweight if you use the Fluxbox desktop - I'm using 1.6GB and no swap right now, even though I'm using firefox.

[JayM]

antiX will run ok on that machine. So will MX 19.1 with Fluxbox, which comes preinstalled: just select it instead of Xfce when you log in. I second the motion of using a lighter (in terms of resource consumption: processor and RAM) web browser whether you choose antiX or MX. Look in Tips&Tricks in the forum to see how seaken64 got MX with Fluxbox to run, consuming only 100MB when idle, on a Pentium III with only 512MB of RAM in it. There are a lot of suggestions in his howto (and in his other detailed post which he links to in the howto) for things like how to prevent services that you decide you don't need from automatically running and for recommendations of lighter-weight applications to replace ones that might be slow and tax your memory or CPU.

[seaken64]

I have a 2007 Gateway MX6959 laptop. It has an Intel core 2 T5500 processor, 2 gigs of ram, Intel mobile 945 GM GPU, and 320 HDD. I installed Lubuntu with LXDE desktop and it was buggy. Tried to change the panel preferences and it just wiped all icons off the panel. Then some of the icons it wiped off weren't listed when I tried to add them back. I was going to try to install antiX but I thought I'd ask first to see if it would run on my old machine.

Yes, antiX will most definitely run very well on that machine. MX-19.1 will also work quite well. But it depends on what you want. Do you want a nice desktop environment like in Lubuntu or Mint? Then I would stay with MX-19.1 on XFCE.

MX-Fluxbox is a viable alternative but the environment is quite different. Even more stark than antiX in my opinion.

If you are looking to do something different and learn then I would go with antiX-19.1 Full or Base. 64-bit will allow you to work with more modern software. But 32-bit will use less memory.

In my experience 2GB is plenty. But then again I don't use MX or antiX for memory hungry apps. I have other computers that have 8GB and modern i5 processors. On my old computers I just use browsers and file managers and little bit of music and text editing, and some video using Kodi or SMTube. Most of my old computers have far less than 2GB and I run MX on machines with only 512MB in some cases.

As it turns out I am working on a similar laptop to yours today. This laptop is a Gateway MT6728 with a 2 core Pentium Dual T2330 and 2GB RAM. I have MX-19.1-64-bit as the main distro. I have set up four other partitions on which I have MX-18.3-32-bit, antiX-17.4-32-bit, and Q4OS-Trinity-32-bit. They all run great!

Seaken64

[Gerhard S.]

my android ( = linux-dev) tablet 2GB ram with firefox v68.4.2 uses about 1 GiB, surfing around here in MX forum, 2-4 tabs opened

[tenmm57]

Thanks to everyone for the advice. I'm going to upgrade it to 4 gigs of ram and install Linux Mint. My Granddaughter wants to learn Linux and I think that would be the easiest one for her to learn on, plus that is one of the distro's her teacher uses. Since they are learning about Linux in school and I figured my old laptop would be good for her to take to school and if it gets broken it wouldn't be a great loss.