On Tue, 25 Dec 2012, gregrwm wrote: > puppy is great when you need it but not really practical if you can do > any better. > > i find lubuntu to be a realistic environment, ubuntu repos available in > entirety. In the end, Lubuntu seemed like the best plan for me. One reason was that I could make a bootable USB stick very easily from the .iso, but I wasn't sure I could get a blank CD-R nearly as easily here in Ecuador. Lubuntu also fit the bill in other ways -- not too demanding of memory and 12.04 still had a non-PAE kernel. It took a few tries, but the USB Disk Creator finally worked and I was excited to install it. After all that, I was unable to complete the install, which was running beautifully, because there was an error with the hard drive. It wasn't able to write a file to the drive, so it stopped. I guess it's a bad hard drive, too, on top of everything else. It is not easy to get decent computers down here in Ecuador. On the bright side -- off to the beach in the morning. It should be in the 90s. Mike