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Zorin os

Zorin OS 6 appears to use a customised desktop with - as far as I can tell - a lot of Gnome 2 under the bonnet / hood. It's quite light on its feet as shown by the fact that I can still surf online on the single core 32-bit 1.6GHz Duron system without any problems.

I'm in a good position to make a direct comparison between Windows XP SP 3 and Zorin OS 6 since I have two identical Dell Intel Atom (1.6Ghz / 1GB) netbooks, one with XP installed, the other Zorin OS 6, so I can literally race them against each other. Zorin 6 comes out best for being much lighter on resources and generally a lot more sprightly. On the other hand there are some essential bits of software which I use which are only available for Windows.

When I started to use Zorin 6 it was, even then, an old distro (It had been in a box of Linux Magazine coverdiscs for a while before I decided to try it). Even then, and before I was aware of Zorin OS 9, there was a general Vibe about Zorin OS trying to present a UI which was as Windows-like as possible for people who loved XP but had had the XP rug yanked from underneath them by big bad MS. Of course you can still use XP offline and, with some care, online although the list of potential security risks from doing so are probably still growing daily.

'Normal' Gnome 2 (As used by standard Debian 6) is one of the Linux desktops I do like, but unfortunately even Debian went to the stripped-down Gnome 3 in Debian 7. I don't know what it was with a wide swathe of developers across different OSes conspiring to destroy what had been perfectly decent, well liked desktop user interfaces beforehand, all at about the same time. (Gnome 2 -> Gnome 3, Gnome-> Unity and Windows classic -> Windows Modern UI are three offenders which spring to mind).
 
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Was thinking about it a while and although it sounds like the OP has given up on the affair I'm sort of curious as to what the exact model of laptop is that it's failing on. Here's one thing I'll say about Pentium III/Mobile Pentium 4-era laptops: those were produced during a sort of rough period for Linux; a lot of laptops from that period have funky ACPI implementations or really open-source unfriendly hardware built in. (Example: Broadcom network cards, both wired and wireless.) Also the mention of it having GeForce graphics raises a bit of a red flag as some of those early GeForce mobile chipsets had some unique quirks. It may well be that the Zorin LiveCD simply can't cope with something about the system. I've had very few problems installing modern Linux on Pentium M and later laptops (with the exception of some real oddballs like a VIA-based HP2133) but it wouldn't surprise me at all if hardware autodetection is a little sketchy once you get past the dozen years old threshold.

(In all fairness machines that old really aren't mainstream hardware anymore. I keep finding 2008 and newer vintage systems in the trash and almost uniformly there's nothing wrong with them other than horked Windows installs so I'd generally say Linux has pretty good coverage of machines that are "garbage" by today's standards. If you really have to install on something truly ancient the text mode Debian installer has totally got your back, and although I'm sure it marks me as some sort of sadist to my mind answering a few questions on a VGA console and watching an ANSI art progress bar for 20 minutes beats the heck out of spending hours manually tracking down ancient potentially virus-ridden driver files so I can install an old pirated version of Windows on the same hardware. But different strokes for different folks.)

It's probably fixable by using an alternate install and a little manual configuration but, really, as has been tautologically pointed out if what one really wants is Windows XP the best replacement for that is indeed Windows XP. After all, the best, or most accurate at least, replacement for anything is another of the same thing. You're almost certainly barking up the wrong tree if you want something that runs your Windows XP software library without any limitations or fiddling. WINE can be genuinely useful for some very specific use cases but those almost all fall into the "I need to run this *one* specific program and am otherwise happy with native Linux applications" category.

(For example, running something like SecurID Softoken software for remote access. Until recently there was no native version but the Windows one runs fine under WINE and doing so is a lot more convenient and lightweight than running it in a VM. WINE is great for tasks like that. It's not great for running Microsoft Office and almost certainly never will be.)
 
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Was thinking about it a while and although it sounds like the OP has given up on the affair I'm sort of curious as to what the exact model of laptop is that it's failing on.

Not a laptop. I'll repeat that the test bed for me was an Intel based desktop PIII running at 1.4 GHz, w/512 MB of RAM, and a Zotac GeForce 620 video card. In all fairness, I ran the test off the CD and it failed to load after the intro screen (It runs the Hiren's XP CD with no problems). I'll try to toss another HD into the mix and see what happen here in the near future. Also, I did run Zorin OS-9 on my HP EliteBook 8560, and Zorin was acceptable as far as built-in apps were concerned, but browsing was not on par with W7, in my estimation. BTW, if browsing was my main concern, I'd probably go with a Chrome Book.
 
Doh! I'm sorry, I somehow got stuck in my head it was a laptop. It still could be something system specific like the video card or a BIOS thing, but it does seem less likely on a desktop. You do see the oddest things sometimes; I knew a guy who freaked out for hours trying to get Linux installed on his very generic Gigabyte brand i845 chipset based motherboard before finally discovering a thread on the kernel developers mailing list discussing a specific BIOS problem with that board that prevented it from booting kernels newer than 2.2. Swapped it for a genuine Intel desktop board with the same chipset and the problem went away. Good times.
 
Doh! I'm sorry, I somehow got stuck in my head it was a laptop. It still could be something system specific like the video card or a BIOS thing, but it does seem less likely on a desktop. You do see the oddest things sometimes; I knew a guy who freaked out for hours trying to get Linux installed on his very generic Gigabyte brand i845 chipset based motherboard before finally discovering a thread on the kernel developers mailing list discussing a specific BIOS problem with that board that prevented it from booting kernels newer than 2.2. Swapped it for a genuine Intel desktop board with the same chipset and the problem went away. Good times.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that I don't believe it's a hardware problem. As far as a PIII goes, it's about as good as it gets; an Intel mobo w/ the 815 chip-set and a top end Tualatin 1.4 CPU. If there's a better video card than the GeForce 620 for a PCI (not PCIe), I'll go after it. Let me free-up some of my valuable 'retired' time and see what it does after a full install (if in fact it does install at all).
 
I'll go out on a limb here and say that I don't believe it's a hardware problem.

Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with the hardware per se, just something about it that might be torpedoing hardware autodetection. It's generally really good on Linux these days, but nothing's perfect. In fact...

If there's a better video card than the GeForce 620 for a PCI (not PCIe), I'll go after it.

This problem is starting to feel familiar. Some years ago I set up an old salvaged Pentium 4 motherboard that had onboard video but no AGP slot as a disposable workstation. (I forget exactly what the board was, one of those 845 or 865 variants meant for disposable desktops.) The VGA output from the onboard video was really weak and looked terrible, so I threw an old GeForce 2 PCI card into it and was somewhat surprised when X11 failed to start. Long story short I seem to recall the issue was that the GeForce driver was assuming that if the system had "AGP" (and technically the onboard video in those systems used AGP and the chipset looks like it has AGP even if it's disabled) it would get really confused if the primary video card was PCI. I *think* I was able to solve it by blacklisting the agpgart and/or intel_agp kernel modules. (As I said, it's been a while.) Sorta wonder if something like this is what you're seeing. It's a little annoying if such an old problem is still sticking around but, well, it is kind of a strange corner case.

Just for laughs if you have a non-Nvidia PCI card lying around I'd suggest trying that? I *think* it only affected the Nividia driver.
 
This model Intel mobo preceded AGP by just a bit. There is a similar Intel 815 with an AGP slot, but not this one. I'm not sure I can find another PCI video card my stash. But, there again a problem surfaces. If Zorin is supposed to be a replacement for XP, why would I need to shop around for hardware compatibility? I'll give it a shot with it installed on a HD and that's going to be the end of it for me.
 
This model Intel mobo preceded AGP by just a bit. There is a similar Intel 815 with an AGP slot, but not this one.

Yeah, the problem is that all of those Intel integrated video solutions going all the way back to the i810 technically employ AGP, even if there's no physical slot. (The same mechanism that AGP cards can use to fetch textures from system RAM is used by the onboard video in those systems for the main framebuffer. Even if the video output is "disabled" in the BIOS the AGP bridge hardware is still present.)

I'm not sure I can find another PCI video card my stash. But, there again a problem surfaces. If Zorin is supposed to be a replacement for XP, why would I need to shop around for hardware compatibility? I'll give it a shot with it installed on a HD and that's going to be the end of it for me.

Well, I can't remember the last time I installed Windows XP (from a generic disk, not a restore disk or a magically hacked MiniXP) that I *didn't* have to go on a scavenger hunt for drivers to make everything work, so I'd say having one driver problem on a Windows XP-era computer should be par for the course. ;)

In any case, no guarantees this *is* the problem, just relating that I'd seen something possibly similar. And technically I was able to solve it with a few minutes of googling and typing one line of text, so... *shrug*. Maybe I've just seen one too many Windows installations irrevocably corrupted by trivial things like installing drivers in the wrong order to feel like it's a dealbreaker, but from the direction you're coming from I wouldn't blame you. Am curious if it works after installed, though. (IE, if it does just turn out to be a problem with the LiveCD functionality.) If it is the same problem I saw someone should file a bug for this corner case.
 
Slapped a HD in the PIII for Zorin and the video failed. CD was busy, but no video. I used both, internal and PCI. So, Zorin doesn't seem to like Intel or Nvidia. To bad, how sad! I'm just going to park that Zorin CD until I get inspired again. Maybe someone else can give it a whirl on an older setup.
 
Yeah, just wasn't meant to be, I guess.

Maybe if I'm really, really bored sometime I'll download the ISO and try it on my ABIT BP6 Dual Celeron. I bet that would be an interesting challenge for the plug-and-play capabilities of one of these modern "pretty" Linuxes. (Could really make it fun by replacing the PCI audio card with my ISA PnP AWE32.)
 
Slapped a HD in the PIII for Zorin and the video failed. CD was busy, but no video. I used both, internal and PCI. So, Zorin doesn't seem to like Intel or Nvidia. To bad, how sad! I'm just going to park that Zorin CD until I get inspired again. Maybe someone else can give it a whirl on an older setup.

Well, I appreciate your tenacity. I'd have given up a long time ago.
 
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