I’ve just finished installing Linux Mint on a mostly ignored Sony Vaio laptop. This machine came with one of the first distributions of Windows Vista (and with only a gig of memory, shared with the video card) so it was dog slow.
As I’m starting to develop training materials for the Raspberry Pi I figured it was time to beef up my Linux skills and the Linux Mint install is a good starting point*.
Installation is a breeze assuming you are totally overwriting the Vista install (highly recommended)! The distro disc is also a live DVD so you can boot and run a Linux Mint OS directly from the DVD to try things out with your hardware before you make things permanent. So far I’m very pleased. Running Mint the Vaio is easily 3 times faster
* – once I started using the linux shell to navigate directories, list files, etc I realized I haven’t really used a Unix system since 1988 or so in college. That pre-dates Linux by about 3 years. lol.