I have an old laptop, currently running Windows, but extremely slowly.
I want to install Linux on it, probably a distro like Puppy, which plays well with low resources. But just about any distro will do as I will give the laptop to someone who only ever uses the browser (Chrome), no other apps.
The problem is that while the laptop BIOS recognizes the internal CD, an external USB CD and a USB thumb drive and allows me to set them high in the boot order and also to select them from the one time boot menu, it will not actually boot from any of them.
The only solution that I can see is to install Linux from Windows (and then, probably, remove Windows).
I tried Wubi, which only installs Ubuntu, but that Ubuntu (12.04) would not recognize my Gigabit Ethernet card. I am drowning in other projects & just don't have time to sort that out, so am looking for another Linux which can be installed from Windows.
I also found wubiX, a fork of Wubi, which says that it will allow to install any distro, but that has no download & the project was started in 2008.
While I am aware that there are things that I could do (get the machine to boot from other than its hardrive, or sort out the Ubuntu networking (which I had expected to work out of the box), but I just don't have time, alas.
I want to give this laptop to a friend who needs it and can't afford one otherwise.
Does anyone know of a Linux distro, other than Ubuntu, which I can install from Windows? (Obviously, no virtual machines, as Windows has slowed to a crawl and a VM on top of that would not help)
Best Answer
What you're looking for is xPUD; a distro with the tagline: "The shortest path to the cloud". It has a very fast boot time, its main component is an Internet browser, it has quite a small form factor and it can be installed from Windows.
Note that you can't (easily) use it for much beyond web browsing, though.