I posted here last month about running Ubuntu under Qemu. I did try that and it does work, but it's very slow. Too slow to be usable in practice. It might work better if I had more RAM and a faster PC. Maybe I'll play around with it when and if I upgrade my PC.

I then tried running live CDs of Linux distributions, specifically Knoppix 4 and Ubuntu 5.1, on my wife's laptop, which is a 4-year-old Dell Celeron 700 with 128 MB of RAM running Windows ME (probably the worst version of Windows that MS has releaaed). It's now pretty much useless for serious work. Ubuntu wouldn't load - it got to a graphical desktop background and never past that point. Knoppix 4.0.2 boots quickly and runs well, with full Internet access. Even on an old, slow machine, Knoppix is snappy, at least for web browsing. Loading large applications, like OpenOffice.org, is painfully slow due to the limited RAM.

Both Ubuntu and Knoppix run fine on my PC, a 4 year-old 1.7 GHz P4. Out of the two, I prefer Knoppix, which loads much quicker than Ubuntu. I couldn't find the house network or my PC's drives under Knoppix though - they may be there, but I coudn't figure out how to access them. MP3s played, although I was getting a weird clicking, gurgling sound when for system actions, like opening and closing windows, and I couldn't find out how to turn it off or what was causing it.

So I decided to install a full distribution on my system, XANDROS 3 Open Cirulation Edition (OCE), which has the reputation of being the best "desktop" Linux for Windows users.

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