RSS 
I have some old computers I haven't been using in ages and I also have some friends without computers. So I decided to donate two of my old computers to my friends without computers. A good match, and I'm not using them so they won't be missed and it'll be nice to see the hardware getting used again (wasted otherwise) in a second or third life.
The two computers are 8 years old with ~600MHz Pentium 3s and 256MB to 512MB of RAM. Not exactly cutting edge anymore. Still, I wanted them to have lots of the nice new stuff, but not run at the speed of slow. So I looked at my options and decided to try Xubuntu, an Ubuntu derivative using the lightweight XFCE desktop environment instead of Gnome and tailored to light weight and/or older machines.
I proceeded to install Xubuntu on the first machine.
The installer is nice, it's an Xubuntu liveCD. It didn't launch properly on the ancient ATi video card in the machine the first time, but worked fine in 'graphics safe mode' (VESA). The install bugged out a few times being 'unable to partition the drive because it didn't have the rights', but eventually it figured itself out and moved on. Then it was smooth sailing.
The system booted fine and was very pretty, and yet still felt fast and responsive. When fully logged into the desktop, a mere 80MB of RAM was being used. Not bad at all. Plenty of space left for apps. The whole time using it it made the old hardware feel fast and responsive. I was quite impressed. Playing movies initially didn't work, and gxine pointed this might be because the Xv extension wasn't supported. I swapped the old ATi card for an old Nvidia card and told X to use the 'nv' driver and video playback worked just fine. Music playback worked fine and web browsing was also no problem.
Probably the most noticeable nice feature was that they are using some kind of volume manager and so USB sticks and such are auto mounted and have icons show up on the desktop that you can unmount them from. Very smooth.
So we packaged the box up and bused with it to my friends house. That was a trip.
So, in the end, Xubuntu has a nice blanace of modern features mixed with lightweight that has very much impressed me. It breaths life into old hardware making it look pretty and feel fast while still giving you everything you'd expect from any other modern OS. It hearkens back to the days when Linux desktops always were lighter weight than other OSs and good for invigorating older hardware. I'm quite impressed.
Xubuntu is clearly my love affair of the week.
