[ltp] Which distro for R51?

[Paul Seelig]

Hi Florian,

if you are already well acquainted with Debian, i'd suggest staying with
it and rather step up to the latest stable release.

Since a few years already, I am maintaining a Debian/stable spinoff
using Window Maker as default GUI, and it also includes a basic XFCE
desktop as a fallback. It is an installable live system, so you can try
it out before possibly deciding to actually install it:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files/wmlive_0.95.7-3/

The ISO images provided are isohybrid ISO's and therefore can just be
dd'ed to a suitably sized USB pendrive and will boot/install from there.

wmlive is developed on the T6x Thinkpad generation and should work out
of the box also on older Thinkpads. The 32bit version boots and install
a non PAE kernel, so it should work just fine on your machine. It even
installs and runs fine on my ancient T23, so a R51 should be no issue.

As wmlive is based and relies on upstream Debian repositories, it is
basically just yet another variant of Debian stable using an alternate
desktop. I certainly didn't want to reinvent the wheel but rather base
my customization efforts on proven fundaments.

The main reason to maintain my own Debian spin off installation media is
because i wanted to have a distribution geared more towards expert users
who rather expect all those nifty comand line utilities and tools to be
already built in without having to retroactively add them after
installation of a more newbie friendly environment. Catering to newbies
is fine, but seasoned users or sysadmins are much better served with
different software defaults.

While not up to date regarding the current version, a basic overview is
given at http://wmlive.sourceforge.net and http://wmlive.rumbero.org.
The README displayed in the download URL cited above has some more
details about the current release.

Feedback, complaints, and enhancements are very welcome.

Regards,
Paul

On 03/25/2016 12:20 PM, Florian wrote:
> I was happy with running Debian 6 on my ancient Thinkpad R51 but now 
> Debian 6 is outdated. Which distro can be recommended to use now?