I am considering buying a low spec laptop to run Linux on. I am thinking of a laptop with a 1Gig CPU and 30GByte Harddisk.

I think that Linux will run fine on an older machine as it is not as demanding as Windows, but I'm not sure I am right.

I'd be interested in anyone's thoughts.

John H, March 2005

Linux will run fine on a machine such as that. I currently run Gentoo (www.gentoo.org) on a 833MHz machine, and Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com) on a 1.2GHz machine. I'd suggest using 512MB of ram, but you'll want at least 256MB.

bob, August 2006

Chances are it'll run just fine. Your biggest problems may be an unrecognized LAN Card or Video Card if they're too old.

A Guy named Bob, March 2005