So the missus old HP laptop is in pretty good knick (barely used in 5 years), other than the fact that its running vista and she won’t let me install a new OS.

So my cunning plan is to bypass the Hd altogether for my use and have myself a USB stick or SD card to boot Linux straight from. My question is which distro? I plan to use it for office type stuff, doc’s and spreadsheets , plus some basic CAD work and possibly for driving a rapityper if I ever get round to it.

Not played with Linux for about a decade so what’s what and which distro would suit my needs best?

I tried a load earlier this year after using Ubuntu for ages.
I eventually came back to Ubuntu.

I’m a huge fan of MINT 17 XFCE. Nice and light interface (The cinnamon interface on the fancy looking version stretches old computers too much IME).

Everything so far on my Dell M4300 works great – the Broadcom wifi card which was previsouly an issue is now an easy thing to get working via software updater. Wireless mouse was ‘plug in and it just works’.

No experience of using it over USB or applying drivers etc… and saving them to the USB image. I imagine things are somewhat slower over USB than a straight install.

ubuntu or mint
the latter will be more ready to go IME
cinnamon is the best interface, but it does struggle on low spec hardware (runs more than fine on an i5 with built in GPU thingumy, but unusably slow on an atom with i900? inbuilt GPU)… so xfce or lxde – your choice

but running from the SD/USB? that’s fine to see that everything works (lan/wifi/etc.), but for actual productivity, and booting, that’ll make vista on a a 5yr old lappy look high performance.

lubuntu if it’s 5 years old. Bit “lighter” than ubuntu but with that comes the disadvantages of slightly trickier setup of things like networking, still fairly easy though. It’s what I run at work.

Ubuntu or mint, mainly because when you need to google something chances are the instructions and/or binaries will be for Ubuntu (and its package manager).

Elementry OS, light weight Ubuntu distro.

I’m a fan of crunchbang which is Debian based. What cad software will you be using?

Elementry +1

Working fine here, on a 7 year old laptop

I used to like suse.

5 years old is new enough to run modern Linux distros (and W7 for that matter) so you don’t need the ‘lightweight for old hardware’ stuff. That’s for like 15 year old kit.

However, it’s also new enough to run Vista which will work well enough if you clean it up. Vista isn’t necessarily slow.

Anyway – Mint is my favourite. Like Ubuntu but more polished, and the people who make it are less aresholey.

What cad software will you be using?

Good question, no idea yet, first task was choosing a Linux distro then I will go research other software, I am well out of the loop on Linux so it will be fun finding out what’s available now. Any suggestions? 2D or 3D something ACAD like maybe something that apes inventor or solidworks?

QCAD had good reviews:
http://www.qcad.org/

With a rather large positive that it is very cheap.

Another vote for Mint here. Like others have said; their “flagship” Cinnamon UI can be a little resource hungry. One of the joys of Linux is you can give it a go and, if you don’t like it, switch to another.

I use Mint on my 7 year old laptop, with MATE instead of Cinnamon, and it’s great.

Agree, Ubuntu or Mint.

Managed to resuscitate a 7 year old Dell laptop with a Broadcom wifi card that confounded most other software. Mint is based on Ubuntu and there is plenty of info around on the web on different laptops and the likelihood of them working with Ubuntu. You can run the distro off the disc first and minimise the risk of compatibility issues.

First experiment is a success, I’ve got ‘Porteus’ booting from an old spare 1GB SD card, very lightweight at sub 300MB, nice and quick and definitely sufficient for web browsing and Office and graphics apps…

I might just hold on to it as a nice, easy to use, quick booting mini system on a card that I can shove in just about any Laptop and get going without faffing.

I quite like Arch myself, even runs on a Raspberry Pi, so should work well on an old laptop.