Hi,
I have almost 10 years old R32 with 1.8 P4, 2 GB ram, ATI 16MB, 160GB HDD, Atheros wifi.
I want to switch it to linux mostly for better performance, movies, music, docs, downloads (rapidshare, torrents) and docs.
Which linux will be the best for me if my only experience with it is Gparted and backontrack3 in live cd version.
I understand pretty well in PC but don't want to use it smoothly without looking ages for every problem.
I want the friendly one with support of all the things that I mentioned.

Or maybe just make a dual boot (how to make it with linux and XP ?) ?

Thank you
Lior

I think you should try Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10 on your R32. I have a R31 that runs Ubuntu 10.10 just fine, works out of the box. Its not a very fast computer even with Linux, but now it is at least practical to use for web browsing, documents and presentations.

If you want to keep windows Ubuntu let you do tat when you install it, just tell the installer to make a 30-40gb windows partition and the rest will be your linux partition.

Tron

I agree use either but don't upgrade to 11.04 because you could have problems then that can't be solved. As far as watching movies like DVD's out of the box you probably won't be able to unless they are old movies (dvd's). You can watch movies that are on your hard drive already within Linux Ubuntu o/s. I've used 9.04 for older computers pentium and pentium 2
For Pentium 4 I used 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" and for AMD 64 I use 11.04 "Natty Narwhal"
which was an upgrade from 10.10.
I've found that a stand alone installation of Ubuntu your sound card won't work and also the wifi card will not always work since it was set up for windows. Ethernet works fine for both o/s.
It is best to install next to windows. I like using both with Linux Ubuntu loading fast and good for going on the internet and email.
Good luck Tom

Thanks for the advice guys.
So, as soon as I'll have some free time, I will install Ubuntu in dual boot mode. I'll update the results.
Lior

Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk

Hi,
I'm new to this site with a recent purchase of a R40 my first thinkpad.
I just finished installing Linux Ubuntu with 10.10 version. I had a problem when I booted
into xp with windows finding new hardware and messing up my Linux install which was working fine before that. I rebooted recovery mode for Ubuntu and tried rebooting again. It was the root directory like dos in windows. It told me to get the new release 11.04. So I typed the command as shown Sudo they call it. When the login shows type your login ID and password even though the password doesn't show it goes in. I typed the sudo as shown exactly and the new release started downloading. Took about 1.5 hrs from start to finish for the upgrade. So now I am running 11.04 Natty Narwhal and windows XP. I'm not running the wireless on XP only the ethernet. Natty Narwhal both wireless and Ethernet. It is the classic version of Ubuntu 11.04 since the hardware doesn't support Unity. Also while all the code and lines that I was trying to read for fun and understanding sometimes the screen goes black. Just hit the space bar and the screen comes back. I went back into XP and there was no new hardware found showing. My R40 is pentium M with 512 ram. Problem solved. Hope this helps someone
I'm impressed with the Lenovo website and all they offer and think my R40 is great
Tom

Ubuntu has very good support for ancient tpads; my X24 works almost perfectly out of the box with 9.10. That said, it has its bugaboos, and for me it is wi-fi. I have never been able to connect to wi-fi properly with any of three WLAN PCMCIA cards I have, and it isn't worth the money/effort to try and get it working again. That computer has gone back to Windows.

have you tried either ndiswrapper or iwconfig?

Any distribution would work nicely on such a powerful machine. The major distributions
for new users are Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, and Linux Mint.

Waking up this thread,
Tried to put Linux mint 12 after XP to set dual boot laptop but can't get it work. Read many threads in Google but still can't setup it to work.
Can anyone guide me how to setup win xp and Linux mint 12 as dual boot system ? I will start from scratch but need support to configure dual boot settings to run these two along side.

Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk

Probably more detail than anyone would need, but this guide explains every step in great detail:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot

I think if it was me, I would try a Fedora XFCE spin. Gnome 3 and KDE will probably operate somewhat sluggishly on older hardware. I imagine Unity (Ubuntu) would be sluggish as well, but I have not tried it. I boot 3 different distros on my X220 and I find the XFCE one to be the most responsive. I am using Arch Linux with XFCE, and I like it, but I would not recommend Arch Linux to you until you get some experience using Linux.

http://spins.fedoraproject.org/xfce/