[DreamsofPolycarp]

If you are going to put the guy on a linux version. you should stick with MEPIS. It sees everything, installs drivers for everything and gets the guy on the internet right away, and allows him to poke around in his file system to see if he can do anything with the data and/or os. Make it easy on the newbies, and NOTHING is easier than Mepis.

It does sound like he needed to burn the cd as an image.

[snowsislander]

If you are going to put the guy on a linux version. you should stick with MEPIS. It sees everything, installs drivers for everything and gets the guy on the internet right away, and allows him to poke around in his file system to see if he can do anything with the data and/or os. Make it easy on the newbies, and NOTHING is easier than Mepis.

Thanks for your advice, but in my opinion my answer was also a considered one.

MEPIS is a fine Debian derivative, but I think that it falls in the Knoppix school of massive distributions.

Generally I have found that Puppy and DSL are excellent with hardware (DSL in particular is good with older hardware that is happier with a 2.4 kernel.) They are both quite fast (they try to run completely in memory) and generally support very reasonable windowing systems on small resources. They both download in a reasonable amount of time on limited bandwidth --- the cd images can be quite small for both, unlike Knoppix or MEPIS.

But since apparently my suggestion of Puppy has not resulted in a positive situation, I will happily echo your suggestion of MEPIS (or Knoppix.)

I just booted both Puppy and MEPIS on an older machine; Puppy as I expected was much faster (it's running entirely in memory, but MEPIS has to reference the CDROM), but both did a perfectly good job of detecting the hardware and getting things going. Puppy at 95 megabytes was a much faster download than MEPIS's 700 megabytes.