Porteus

Help, someone! I have tried all the available versions of Porteus on my Acer Aspire 1353XV, which is currently running Windows 7 as an experiment, and happily runs Puppy. No joy. Boot was from CDs, which is all that the computer will allow. I was wanting MATE edition, or perhaps LXDE. MATE gives me a desktop, but the screen flashes, presumably refreshing, once every two seconds
or so, and the menu button refuses to install on the toolbar; there is no mouse cursor visible. LXDE gives me the wallpaper and a trash icon, and nothing else. OpenBox gave me a desktop, but none of the menu buttons work, and nothing shown in the right click run menu will open, either. Any ideas?

hi, welcome to the forum
what sort of specs does this machine have? RAM in particular... though if it runs windows 7, that shouldn't be a problem..
"all the available versions of Porteus" .. including older versions? 32bit or 64bit?
i think puppy usually loads to ram by default? maybe try using the copy2ram boot option... it's possible your cd read speed is the bottleneck(if ram is not the problem)

If your Acer is a 486 machine try slax 7.0.8 MarktheFloot. I just tried it on an old 586 Dell notebook and it works with working wifi too.

As ncmprhnsbl commented, there is no reason that you linux box couldn't stand porteus.