Hey everyone, I am building a computer for a good friend of mine who has Cerebral Palsy, and not too much money. I have a number of trades on different forums going on, but at the present, things look like this: an AMD Athlon 800 mhz SlotA processor, coubpled with 192 megs of PC100 SDRAM. It's going to have something around a 10 gig HD, and it's going to have a cheaper graphics card. Anyway, to the point, I need a free, complete distro of Linux that I might install, as I don't want to leave him with windows 98, and I don't want to spend the money for XP. Xandros and SuSE all have restrictions on their open circulation editions. Xandros would have been my first choice, as I have the most experience with it, and it is nearly impossible to screw up... I already have downloaded copies of BSD, and Gentoo. Can anyone comment if either of these might be acceptable for a newbie? This computer has to be able to surf the web (dialup), type, and maybe do a few entertaining video games. Any thoughts are appreciated.

Well, a distro question, I rarely get involved. I myself am a Gentoo guy but would not recommend it for a newbie unless they wanted to spend alot of time and learn a good deal during the often difficult install process. However, I recently started using SUSE 10 on my work laptop. I am very happy with it. It has the eye candy that is appealing to many windows converts, as well as a very intuitive GUI based managment utility called YAST that allows you to modify just about everything from software to hardware. What limitations are you refering to in your POST? It is not the Pro version, but I did the FTP OSS install which is free and I am happy with it. Also, I recently set my father up with Ubuntu on an old computer - 333mhz, 192ram, 8gb hdd - He doesn't have Cerebral Palsy but he can barely use a mouse and has trouble double clicking if that counts. All he does is check his web mail and use open office (which surprisingly runs half decent on that computer (once it loads)). He is very happy with it. Good Luck. HippieJoe

This kid is mostly afflicted with partial loss of mobility in his legs. Setting up is no problem- I have significant Linux experience. I do need something that has good hardware auto-detection, is compatible with a lot of different hardware, and doesn't suck too much in the way of system resources, while still looking pretty. So there are no time limits or restrictions on open circulation? Xandros doesn't give me full CD burn speed, a firewall, or antivirus unless I buy... I guess I will have to check out SuSE then. Otherwise, can anyone comment on using FreeBSD? I'm thinking that it might be a little bit lighter-weight than others...

HI There: I'm fairly new with linux, but have tried several versions and have found that Mepis is similar to Xandros except it uses k3b to burn with and has all the Debian pkgs available, I installed it on computer with a 400cel and 128 megs of ram and the fella that uses it likes it and has no problems with it, all the other computers in his business are win98 machines. Good Hunting rkenny

I have used many distros and must say for a gui that is easy to use i would recomend KDE (latest stable verson at time of build) as is can be made to look how you like it another good and light gui would be icewm its not as configerable as KDE but runs vv fast on anything i happen to throw at it the folowing distors are good for learners Vector linux: Slackware based easy to set up it has a utill called vdsm to set up hardware during install and inside a tui/bash :) xorgcfg -textmode is usefull for that vid card that just wond work www.vectorlinux.com Get Firefox

no question about it: Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com) www.linuxteens.com

yes ubuntu i found was the best and fastest