In my case, I burned the CDs on another machine, and then used them on grandma's Thinkpad R31. Some older optical drives can only read CD's, not burn them.

If your laptop has an older optical drive, it may not be able to read DVD media. Many of the newer Linux distributions exceed that, requiring a DVD or USB stick instead.

When installing, it is best to have the laptop plugged in to an electrical outlet, and hard-wired to the internet in case it needs to download the latest drivers for your particular hardware.

The latter often requires less RAM to use. Some Linux distributions offer both a full LiveCD+Installer version, as well as an alternate text-based Installer-only version. Windows and Mac OS users can try out Linux without impact to their existing environment. The 'Live' version allows you to boot up and try out the operating system without modifying the contents of your hard drive.

The ISO can be either a 'LiveCD/LiveDVD' version, an installation program, or a combination of the two.

These can be either (a) burned to a CD, (b) burned to a DVD, or (c) written to a USB memory stick.

Most Linux distributors allow you to download an ISO file for free.

For those who aren't familiar with installing or running the Linux operating system, here are some helpful tips: Grandma's Thinkpad R31 has only 384MB of RAM.Īll of the ones below are based on Linux. Continuing my series on a, I thought I would pursue some of the 'low-RAM' operating system choices.

Slitaz install debian package from file