Donating old computers

[srochford]

Not sure if this is the right place or the right title!

 

We have quite a lot of elderly computers that we are going to donate to a variety of charities. They originally came with XP Home and I'd guess we could put that back on them (but the chances of finding all the original license codes are vanishingly small ...) so I thought we'd put Linux on them and a variety of basic apps.

 

The question, then, is "which Linux" (and, but later, "how")?

 

I keep reading good things about Ubuntu but have had no luck with it (machines are c.2GHz Celeron, Intel chipset (845 graphics), Realtek AC97 Audio and for the past 20 minutes I've had a heron picture on the screen and watching the CD light flicker while the "Install" box sits there not doing anything.

 

Is Ubuntu a good distro to use? Is there a better one? Is there a single CD which I could just use which will auto install a reasonable setup?

[kmount]

Morning Steve,

 

Yes, ubuntu would be my choice as it comes with office etc already installed and makes it easiser for the end user. - We recently did this on a room of 30 machines and it didn't take that long.

 

I think there's a means of doing an unattended setup if you have a lot of them to do...

[FN-GM]

I would also use Ubuntu and I would consider Kubuntu.

[kmount]

As much as I prefer KDE, I wouldn't recommend Kubuntu as the latest version didn't receive LTS (Long Term Support) status.