Hello, everyone. I believe that 'arochester' is talking about the Windowing environment XFCE (XFCE.org). It uses less memory that KDE or Gnome and has gained quite a following. It is "roughly" based on Sun's CDE (Common Desktop Environment), but forget all of the screenshots that you have seen of the hideous CDE environment. ;-) (When I say "roughly," I do meant "roughly.") "Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for various *NIX systems. Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources." -- Olivier Fourdan, creator of XFCE Visit www.xfce.org and view the screen shots and the animated demonstrations. I am definitely going to try XFCE, although I will have to compile and install from source, because there is no RPM (yet) for the distribution I mainly use, SuSE 10.1. You might want to check out Distrowatch.org. If you are looking for a distro with a GUI that will fit entirely in the memory of your hardware configuration, you might want to learn about Puppy Linux. I think it takes a little over 120 MB of RAM and stays entirely in memory. The home pages are <http://www.puppylinux.org/> and <http://www.puppyos.org/>. I have downloaded the ISO for the latest version, 2.0.1, simply because I am fascinated with the philosophy behind the distribution and the technology behind it. (My "Linux box" has a 2.0-GHz Pentium-4 processor, 1-GB of RAM, and two 120-GB hard drives, but I love to try out interesting distributions.) I am not necessarily advocating Puppy Linux as your main distro, and the puppy mascot may not appeal to you -- but remember that, in general, Linux is going to demand less, in terms of hardware resources, than Windows or other proprietary operating systems. Finally, please do not be afraid to experiment. Listen to people's advice, do a lot of research, but remember that you may end up trying five or more distros before you find "the one," which is okay, because you will learn about Linux with each different distribution that you try! :-) Cordially, David P.S. -- If I were in your situation, I would definitely try Xubuntu (which uses XFCE), Greensystemsgo. Ubuntu uses Gnome and Kubuntu uses KDE. Ubuntu is gaining in popularity, and your desktop environment with it will not be an obstacle. -- "If Linux does not have the solution, then you have the wrong problem." -- M.D. Watts

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I've just installed Linspire 5.0 on a similarly speced machine. See http://p100.ezboard.com/ffreeandopenlinuxandopensourcefrm2.showMessage?topicID=305.topic the machine is a on a 266Mhz P2 Compaq with 218MB of RAM. I added a 40 Gig Hard Drive, which the BIOS doesn't recognise, but if I put the boot partion on the 4 Gig drive that was already there it boots fine.

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