Lightweight-linux distros

[sciphi]

Hi, I have an old acer laptop which has a 1.7 celeron processor with 512 mb of ram .It is really slow and I want to install a linux distribution for listening to songs and watching movies mainly.I would also be doing some programming. Support for all common formats(divx/xvid/rmvb) is preferable.Fast boot-time would be great too. Which distribution would you recommend keeping all these in mind ? Thanks !

 

[talktorishav]

You have a preety good computer. How about Xubuntu 9.04

 

[NucleusKore]

Xubuntu 8.04

 

[hullap]

the best would be slitaz. it has mplayer for all video/songs needs, and geany for programming ones. its 80 mb when uncompressed and should run uber fast

 

[sciphi]

Thanks guys, I'll try these out...

 

[Liverpool_fan]

Arch Linux. (but you should be experienced enough in Linux)

 

[sciphi]

After a bit of trial and error, I've gone with xubuntu 9.04 for now ... it seems to be reasonably fast on my machine.The booting takes some time but after booting it is fairly responsive. I did try slitaz but I got a few errors in mplayer , so I left it.Thanks for the help guys

 

[abhijangda]

Use linux Mint it's light easy to use and also contains most of the codecs for playing songs and movie.

 

[MetalheadGautham]

Good Choice. But you might want to migrate over to Debian Squeeze with Xfce 4.6 if you gain some experience.

 

[nileshgr]

Arch would be a good one... Wiki help available for every problem along with Mailing List and Forum.

 

[4T7]

How about Zenwalk

 

[skeletor]

I would recommend Arch because I love it...

 

[sciphi]

Ubuntu 9.04 was working gr8 and I had all my hardware detected including my wireless until I found out that my dvd-rom drive wasn't working even with the latest updates I just formatted the drive and installed Windows XP instead which is ok. I am not really that experienced in linux to go with something like arch linux yet guys.