I’ve been a fan of the Zorin OS Linux distro for a while now. Their Core OS is a great Linux distro for those just getting into Linux if they’re coming from a Windows background. It’s also good for regular Linux users if you just want to install a distro and just have it work out of the box.
However today I want to talk about Zorin OS 11 Lite and my Asus EEEpc 701 4G Surf. The last time I tried running Zorin Lite on the limited laptop I ran out of hard drive space after doing all the updates. This time I installed it without using a swap partition. After the installation and updates there was roughly 300MB hard drive space left. I uninstalled some software that I felt was unnecessary for the EEEpc and when all was said in done I had close to half a GB of space left. Within recent years that’s a lot of space left over on 4GB hard drive.
It also not only looks great but works great as well. While you won’t be watching a ton of YouTube on it it’s great for casual web browsing and Facebook and the like. The only quibble I had is that the Fn keys weren’t responsive at all however you’ll still be able to use all the controls with no problem.
So for right now Zorin OS 11 Lite gets the slight nod over Watt OS as my favorite OS for my EEEpc.
The Trench Reynolds Report 
I would give a custom 32 bit LXQt build of Porteus from their website http://build.porteus.org . Mine came in at 416,586 KB with Opera, Skype, Libre Office, and printing support. If you keep the LXQt but don’t put the rest of that in you will probably end up at ~300 MB or so. As is, mine runs quite handily from a multi-boot 16 GB USB drive I created with Easy2Boot on my eMachines em250 N270 based netbook.
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Make that 236 MB with Abiword and Printing Support!
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Thanks azrielle. That’s going to be my next project, I’ve been wanting to try the LXQt desktop.
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Hey Trench, nice article. I had a question. Im trying to install Zorin OS 11 Lie 32bit on an old machine with a 4gb SSD. However, during installation, it stopped me and said not enough space… 😦 I checked the website it says zorin lite requires at least 5gb of storage. how did you get it to install on your asus? thanks!
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When it comes to disk space during the installation and choose the something else option and dedicate all the disk space to the installation and use no swap space.
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