VBox on Windows is something I've yet to try. (I've given up hope of ever becoming a Rational Being. I "upgraded" to a hyperthreading-but-still-Pentium 4 Dell desktop, treated it to two hard drives, put XP on one and Mint on the other. About every three or four months I fire up the XP partition, spend a couple of hours updating it, shrink its data partition a little further, enlarge the meant-to-be-shared data partition on the drive for more distro isos which upset VBox by being on NTFS, and forget about the Windows bit for another three months. It'd be simpler to either wipe the Windows installation, or to actually use it occasionally.)

I digress. As usual.

I suspect it might be worth my trying the latest version of VBox occasionally, but anything still in the repos tends to be "safe."

I finally got W8 working after a fashion. An elderly laptop turned out, for all its shortcomings, to have the only visualisation-friendly CPU I have, and W8 won't work on VBox without this. The laptop's maxed out at 2GB of RAM, and VBox spouts dire warnings about the fact that I've allocated more than half the available RAM to the virtual machine.

Mint ambles along quite happily on what's left, however - slightly unusual spectacle of <300MiB unused RAM during W8/VBox operation.

For some reason, my curiosity persists about distros for slow/old/limited computers (empathy? Who said that? How dare you???)

An Eee PC 2G has had me tearing my hair out. Its 2GB/1.86GiB SSD is very limiting these days, especially as the SD card reader is broken.

I tried two versions of Leenux for the 2G (two different archives; they've defeated everything I can find to try to unpack them.)

I tried installing Debian, but the installation kept failing - perhaps I was doing something wrong.

Reasonably modern Puppy Linux and derivatives couldn't handle the 800x480 screen resolution.

Slitaz to the rescue (it's available through Distrowatch links.) I'd not had much luck with it previously, but decided it would do no harm to give it a try.

Not an "easy" distro, but a very impressive one. I've added Firefox, LibreOffice, Abiword and Gnumeric - the last two 'cos I didn't think I'd figure out how to get LO installed. Patience proved key to that...

According to GParted, 333 MiB of the 1.86 GiB SSD has now been used. Incredible.

Apps are a touch slow to open, but run quickly once they're launched.

It took care of screen resolution all on its own; connecting to the wireless router involved a slightly non-intuitive but, once I'd figured it out, quick and effective wizard. No driver problems so far - admittedly, I've not tried sound yet. With just GParted open, it's idling along happily at 4-8% CPU and 48MB RAM out of 493.

Run from a live CD, Slitaz loads into RAM (only needs a quarter of a gig, I think) and is very fast indeed. I assume it wouldn't be feasible to install apps into RAM, given their sluggish installation onto a hard drive, but I could be mistaken. The ideal might be a persistent install to a USB flash drive allowing the whole thing to run in RAM, but also allowing additional packages to be installed.

I may, of course, be talking complete rubbish again.

So the weekend's early Linux embotherations seem to be taking a turn for the better.

Now, if I could only sort out Mint's date and time configuration...