Just bought an acer inspire one so back with another go at linux 
Fedora 8 I believe. Meanwhile have ubuntu 9 on a laptop with about 250mb ram and its struggling (and wifi doent work) so an alternative ‘lite’ is being sought. have a small collection of dead and dying pcs id like to linux up in due course.
radio ham gw0tqm
and work in mental health
hi all
Carl
Hi, first off, appreciate that older PC’s will be more trouble than they’re worth when it comes to getting Linux working on them. 1Gb of RAM now costs next to nothing for most machines so trying to get something working inside of 256M, although it can be done, it’s simply not cost effective in terms of time. Go spend the fiver on a memory upgrade and many of your problems will vanish.
If you want a smaller footprint, take a look at systems based on XFCE rather than “Gnome”.
You might find this interesting to play with;
http://www.knoppix.net
Not used it in a while, but I think it used to give you the option of running XFCE …
Any distro based on either XFCE, LXDE, or Fluxbox should be a ‘lite’ distro… Fluxbox is supposed to be the lightest of these 3 as far as memory footprint is concerned, but has a slightly ‘spartan’ desktop interface.
Out of the 3… I would probably go for LXDE but there isn’t much between the 3, so it’s going to be a personal choice thing
If you have an AA1, advanced mode uses the XFCE desktop so you should feel at home.
there are Linux Mint versions of all 3 desktops along with screenshots here: