Linux Distro for Presentations?

I work at a small engineering company. In our conference room we have an ancient Dell Inspiron 5000 (Celeron (the original, based on the Pentium II), Win98) attached to a LCD projector we use for displaying presentations. It is currently without any network access at all; before I arrived they tried to get a ethernet PCMCIA card to work and failed. Needless to say it also lacks a wireless card (and the company lacks a wireless network).

I'm looking for a linux distro (preferably a LiveCD) that could be used on the computer to make presentations. Currently, Win98 is being obstinate and not willing to work with anyone's USB key (even with correct drivers installed) so burning powerpoints to CD is our only option to get them onto the computer.

I've recently tried the DSL-N (**** Small Linux -Not) but that wasn't able to boot.

I'm pretty sure Ubuntu is too massive; but I'm not sure what other live CD's come with a powerpoint compatible app. I'm open to suggestions!

PS I know the best solution would be to just get a new laptop, but I've been researching laptops for my boss since last summer and she keeps waiting to pick one; hopefully the release of the Core2's will prompt her to purchase one soon. However, in the meantime, playing around with Linux will keep me busy and should improve our presentation-making ability (it currently takes about 5 minutes to boot the laptop).

 

Forget about liveCD's. They'll usually take ages to boot on older hardware, and afterwards you have to go through alot of configuration hassle. Debian, Xubuntu and the like will run just fine if it has 128 megs or more memory. OpenOffice.org will be horribly, terribly slow though, and it may not be 100% compatible with Powerpoint. My recommendation is to just install Windows XP in it.

 

Try xubuntu. They make a Xubuntu LiveCD that shouldn't be too much of a pig, but should work with USB and all. That's about the best I can think of off the top of my head. How much memory does the laptop have? Pentium II isn't too bad, but if you're working with less than 128MB of RAM, you might have some issues. HTH.

Oh, and gentonix: A PII era machine, if it's not faster than 300MHz, is NOT recommended for XP. The 128MB RAM minimum is also just that... the OS minimum. You'll need more RAM if you want to actually run a program.

 

I used XP for nearly two years with a K6-2/450 and 128 megs of RAM, and managed to get my work done. While it may not be plenty fast, it'll most likely be usable at least.

PS. the links says 64mb is minimum, 128mb or higher is recommended.

 

I will certainly look into Xubuntu; see how that goes. DSL-N seemed incompatible with the hardware itself, hopefully other LiveCD's will fare better.
I'm looking into LiveCD's because I don't want to wipe out the windows installation that functions (and that people at work can use) with a Linux distro that may or may not work, and will likely not be usble by anyone at work other than myself (I'm literally half the age of any of the technical staff here, one of which refers to any removable storage (CD, ZIP disk etc) as a 'data tape' and so I'm not counting on any of them to pick up Linux servicably in the near future).

I'm not sure how much RAM it has, certainly at least 128MB, might be more like 324ish. It was (laughably) used to run SolidWorks 2001, and has a discrete ATI workstation graphics card (4MB, I believe). My concern about vanilla Ubuntu running slowly came from my experiences with installing Ubuntu 6.06 on my P2/450 at home (which still has network issues, but that's a problem for another day).

WinXP isn't an option due to my similar experience with running Windows XP on the aforementioned P2/450. And that fact that I'm doing this without a budget whatsoever; just to make my life easier until I leave at the end of the summer and/or my boss gets herself a new laptop.

 

Is it even possible to boot from CD on that machine? Maybe that's why you couldn't get DSL to boot? I only mention it because that was the problem I had this weekend with a tecra 510cdt. It simply will NOT boot from CD- only from floppy. You may need to pull the HDD, stick it in another machine, partition it (3 or 4 volumes), and make the DSL image one of the partitions and boot from that. Then install onto the free partition. You should also be awaare that if you use video clips they might not play in the the presentations. I haven't been able to get videos to play in my O presentations.

 

I am able to boot from CD.
It was while DSL-N was actually booting that there were repeated errors, something to the effect of not being able to read from the disk.

I had the penguin in the upper left corner of the screen and then basically it spat error messages at me for several minutes.

Now, it's entirely possible that it was a bad burn and I just need to re-try burning the iso to CD. Given an opportunity, I'll try booting Xubuntu and see if I have the same error or something else.

PS Forgive me for not knowing proper terminlogy; I am a linux n00b.

 

No problems. Burn at a low speed if you think that the CD might have errors. It depends a lot on the media you used, as well as the burner and computer. And be aware that Linux starts in text mode usually, and a number of errors are just non-issues (like not finding a RNG). Not sure how n00b-ish you are