Have an old Dell Inspiron, PIII-500, 512MB RAM, 80gb disk, screen is 15" and does 1600x1200.  Its lovely but it sold and slow (Win2k on it now)

Wondering if Ubuntu Netbook might be lighter weight and run better than Desktop.... Any opinions?

Thanks.

The main difference between the Netbook release, and a standard is the amount of included binaries, and the window manager that is set to default. Netbook edition is trimmed down so you can get it on a pen drive, or the such. It also uses a dumbed down WM that looks like something out of a Kiosk. You can take the netbook edition and make it the exact same as standard by installing a few packages and switching over to Gnome.



I would say on an older computer it wouldn't hurt to give it a try.

Other than UNR, you might want to try xubuntu.  I'ts another distro that's stripped down for lower memory systems.

I installed it on my Inspiron 5100 (7-8 years old) and it runs perfectly.

I haven't played with changing the layout yet, and I kind of like the permanent "start menu".

You can run it from a CD so it doesn't change anything on your computer, unless you want to, so you really have nothing to lose.

If you want an old machine to really fly, try one of these....

Legacy OS
Puppy

I tried running the netbook edition in a VM on my Aspire and it was painfully slow. Even after upgrading the memory to 2GB and increasing what was allocated to the VM it wasn't usable. Might be better if you're running from a flash drive or something. I think I'm going to try the standard version and see how that compares.