Need an extremely light distro

[kiipa]

Why not just use the beginner's guide? If it's too complicated it might be a sign that Arch is not the right choice.

[Dynamic_Gravity]

Puppy Linux, the absolute lightest distro possible.
LINK

[jfing14]

Because it only goes through installing the os, and installing the dependencies that are required for steam in wine and more complicated things aren't in the beginner's guide. Sure they are on the wiki but I'm just compiling all that into one big guide that way anyone should be able to actually use it like a normal distro

[zackwynne]

Depending on how light you need it to be, you could try Tiny Core. The default install is 15 MB (Yes, you read that right.)

http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/welcome.html

[Garfield]

I run Lubuntu on a Athlon II M320 based Notebook with 3Gig RAM. Runs okay. Problems are mostly due to lacking CPU Power in needlessly complicated websites, nothing the distro could change.

Before we go into an all out distro war out here you could install a bunch of the distros mentioned here and try them out for a bit. They are free after all and since they all are pretty minimal it's not even bandwith heavy.

[jfing14]

yayyyy almost done. here is the guide

Continuing the discussion from Full Arch Linux Install Guide - Arch 101:

Full Arch Linux Install Guide - Arch 101

A-arch?

Do YOU want to be a semi neck beard and impress your somewhat neckish friends but don’t want to install gentoo and be a /g/tard? Arch is your new best friend.

omg… FOR FUCKS SAKE ANOTHER ARCH INSTALL GUIDE! No, no, no, this one is a little different, its more of a collaboration of things and I will be running through a complete install guide up to the point where you will be playing your favourite games natively in wine. And moreso the point of this is so you don’t end up running into a multitude of issues like crashing your computer ever time you run Xorg because for some reason you really messed up your graphics card drivers. Even if you are super newfag than you should be able to understand this guide.

[ro55mo]

I am going to second / third those saying Lubuntu or possibly Mint Mate which was sub 256MB of RAM when I tried it out, if I recall correctly.

They are both very simple "beginner" distros, suitable enough for those jumping from XP or Windows 7 in terms of look and feel.

[Nightraven13]

You can also try some openbox distros,since he will be using only chrome. Something that is rock solid and based on Debian like Semplice Linux. I carry it on USB stick when I need to use computers on my college,its pretty zippy.

[max1220]

Lol, why not plain Debian headless +

sudo apt-get install lightdm openbox

then?

On that regard: I'm running debian for quite a while now on my Intel Atom netbook. Every Desktop I tried so far worked great. From openbox to Gnome 3! (Yes, you can use Gnome on an Intel Atom! It's not even that laggy & fairly usable!)
Also, someoneentioned the rpi: I found that to ne a really good exanple for lightweight linux, as the old versions only had a single-core ARM(Which even in high-clocked SMP configs is slower than x86) at 0.7 GHz(!) and 1/4GB of RAM and still featured a full Desktop + Webbrowser.
You C2D is an alien monster compared to an rpi, and thus should run great, if configured correct! (noatime, etc)

[Streetguru]

Dos?