[SLL] Best Distro for PIII Dell Inspiron 8000 laptops

[Abha Harting]

I have a friend who works with native communities in the Amazon under his
own non profit. He is a radio geek and he sets up radio communications for
them. He has also gotten them a number of computers mostly set up with
Windows since that is what they know.

He likes Linux and wanted to install Ubuntu on some used laptops he recently
acquired, but that has not worked out. He loses the display post install. He
is not a Linux geek, so he would hope to not have to go to the command line
to fix it. Also, I had found a link stating that Ubuntu has a problem with
thrashing laptop hard drives:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695  I have
the same model myself and I had put Mandrake 10.1 on it in the past with no
problems, but that was the i386 version. That laptop model was certified for
Mandrake in earlier versions. Currently I noticed that the current MANDRIVA
download is i586. I installed it on an older desktop and post install (the
install seemed to run OK), it would NOT even boot. Now that was
disappointing.

My friend would like to install a distro that will work positively for his
clients. I would hope so too so that their first exposure to Linux would be
good. Currently they are often using pirated copies of Windows software.

So, any suggestions?

Abha