I am looking into putting Linux on an older laptop. Its a perfectly good computer just laying around. I am a newbie when it comes to Linux so I am looking for any advise as to what I should try out. A friend of mine said that I might want to tryout Linux Mint. The Laptop is a Toshiba Satellite M115, 2GB ram, 120gb storage. This is a project laptop so that I might learn. Any suggestions. Thanks.
I think something like Lubuntu would run okay, 2GB ram is sufficient and that laptop appears to have a core 2 duo. You shouldn't run into trouble with wifi either, seems it has intel wifi which is well supported
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Lubuntu will work nicely I have it on an old dell laptop with it and it works well. You could also use something with xfce like Xubuntu.
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Thanks very much. I will do some research and start from there. Thanks again.
Mint also offers a couple different lightweight builds you'd be able to run on that machine with much of an issue. Being that you're new to the linux world it's best you stick with Ubuntu/Mint IMO just to ease you into the transition.
Should you find that you're catching on quickly, or want to try something else, you can always make some Live Filesystem disks and boot up in those to test out other flavors.
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I've personally had bad experiences with Mint on old machines. The problems lie with Cinnamon (which is the main feature of Mint as it is preinstalled), the horrible management of older drivers, and the general slowness over time. Mint is the worst in my experience with aging. Leave one well maitneanced, updated, and used frequently for a year and it'll be a crawl by then. Even with LXDE or MATE on it, you'd still run into problems later.
I've had the best luck with Lubuntu. On two laptops, both with 2 GB of RAM and one ancient core perform beautifully. I have Kodi on one of them (auto-login and Kodi is a startup application) hooked up to my TV and can play 1080p with 5.1 Dolby Surround. I could barely play video at all in Mint even after I manually installed the Intel Graphics drivers which are for "Ubuntu only" (which is a lie since Mint is basically the same in that field).
If you really want to get down and dirty you can get Debian without a graphical interface at all. Just the command line. It'd only really make sense to use as a 90's terminal, command experimenter, or server at that point, but it will technically be the fastest. In fact, if you want to set up a server that doesn't need ZFS or BTRFS, then I would definitely choose raw Debian. Unlike Ubuntu Server, it's a lot faster and more stable. Plus, it doesn't have a bajillion apt repositories out of the box. For a server, Debian won't leave you angry about your decision later.
I don't want to start a war here, but that's my experience. It's an official Ubuntu derivitave. so you'll get full support for it on AskUbuntu and the Ubuntu Forums (as well as here). Also, most Linux Google Searches will pull up instructions for doing something in Ubuntu anyways.
Linux Lite is good or lubuntu. You kinda want something that uses no more than 1GB ram
If you want an example, fedora with GNOME uses about 500 MiB of RAM. with KDE about 600 MiB. I don't know of any distro uses that uses even close to 1GiB out of the box (without any user applications running).
Depending on your browsing habits, the browser can eat a lot of ram if you have a lot of tabs open. I would stay away from chromium/chrome. Firefox is ok-ish and there are other lightweight browsers, like midori or luakit (luakit requires manual editing of configuration files, it might be a bit daunting at first).
If it's just a project, I would try a few distros, to see which work better. Installing a linux distro takes only 5-10 minutes.
One thing that makes Lubuntu so well optimized is that it uses LXDE. In my experience, GNOME and KDE hog graphics horsepower as well as memory. It's probably not going to be memory that's an issue until you open other programs. It's the number of cores, speed of the cores, and graphics capacity. Intel Linux drivers honestly suck.
The 64 bit version of Ubuntu uses around 800MiB of RAM with no applications running but this is mostly because Unity is a hog.