Have a cheap-o desktop from a couple years back, when they were putting Vista on machines whose performance would have been mediocre even on XP (so maintenance was awful and it was always freezing). Have a 7 year old who, like most 7 years with a computer, goes to a lot of flash web sites (like Nick.com, pbskids.org). I didn't realize how hungry Ubuntu and Kubuntu had gotten in the past two years until I tried them. Kubuntu, in particular, pretty much froze solid. I needed something that could run well with integrated graphics and 512mb RAM, while still looking"normal" enough for a child to use and decided on Antix.

I didn't want Xubuntu since I didn't really care for the look of XFCE, and reports were that it was nearly as ram hungry as Ubuntu. Xubuntu might be great for netbooks with lightweight processors, but it was not what I wanted for a machine that needs to run flash in a modern browser on two sticks of 256mb RAM and still have room for a little game in the background. I knew Antix would be a bit more configuration, but I wasn't completely unfamiliar with that and have ended up"tinkering" on every major end-consumer operating system.

Had some trouble with getting the sound working, but you guys were awesome and helped me out. I looked for a lightweight dock, found wbar and configured that for her, with icons for web browser, a folder with games (I used .desktop files to make them have icons), one with educational software, and one with movies, as well as one for writing and painting. I added another one for her"library," which is calibre, and set her up with some books with covers that look sweet in the cover browser.

Then I got samba up and running (although somehow Webmin failed me, manually editing the config file did the trick) and used it to share the permanently mounted network hard drive (hopefully, anyway; I had to tinker with fstab and chmod since it's NTFS..currently it works). As an added plus, I tinkered with xorg.conf and fixed the problem that this particular monitor had even in Windows, in which starting certain games would give out of range errors.

So. The machine that sputtered with Vista and would have been a pain to downgrade is currently a samba server, ebook center, gaming computer, and learning station. __{{emoticon}}__ Not to mention that I installed some emulators and she can play everything from SNES to NDS. Yea! Who would have thought Antix would be a child friendly operating system... __{{emoticon}}__

Wow. Great Post there lcmidas. Doing a reinstall to /dev/hd5 right now with the newer 8.5 upgraded AntiX over a previous 8.5 on old IBM M41 with about the same specs.
Using thye full iso on this install. Have a monstrous Dell CRT with this one. Has wireless USB also. Glad to hear things went well for you and the kids. __{{emoticon}}__

That is a GREAT story! A couple of years ago, all I had were OLD computers. For many years, all I had was a 1 GHz Dell Dimension 4100, a great desktop system in its day with a 40 GB IDE Western Digital hard drive, 256 MB of memory and a Pentium III processor. New, it ran Windows 2000 Professional quite well, but of course, that isn't what I wanted to run on it, so I carved that disk into TWELVE partitions! Back then, a 3-5 GB partition was fine, so I could test a lot of distros. The box did not have very good power for running a virtual environment, so I never did that. I discovered after a few years that small Live CDs would run well, but large Live CDs were sluggish. My introduction to MEPIS in its first year, before it moved to KDE, was that it was light and fast live - and I believe in those days it used the IceWM window manager.

When antiX came out in 2006 I was quite interested, because I always had a soft spot for that very first May 2003 MEPIS release. The antiX release reminded me at least a little bit of it. I helped coax anti into including IceWM, then in making it the default. I know that the purists in the gang love Fluxbox, and that is fine, but I felt that antiX with IceWM made a slightly easier entry point for first time users.

I picked up an AMD 900 MHz Thunderbird system that was slower than my Dell, and no full featured system would run very well on it. The first thing I thought of was antiX. Can't remember if I installed the BASE or the FULL version, but it seems to me at the time that Fluxbox was still the default environment. My son, who is nine, almost ten now, was around seven back then. He got on that thing before I remembered that it had Fluxbox by default. Do you think that sharp kid had any trouble figuring it out? No way! The left mouse button didn't work so he just tried the right mouse button, navigated around a bit, and in he went, finding a Web browser and on to the Internet games! Kids are amazing - my son is, anyway, but I have to watch him like a hawk because he still does not have sound discernment in all cases. He's learning, but he is still a work in progress! __{{emoticon}}__ -- then again, aren't we ALL? __{{emoticon}}__