X keeps restarting

[hxr.keltz]

I am currently attempting to repair my friend's ancient Dell Inspiron 1000. I'm using the Mint XFCE DVD, loaded onto a flash drive, because his CD drive broke. Either way, when it boots up, X seems to get stuck showing a mouse cursor, then restarting in an endless loop. This seems true of almost any distribution I use, except simple ones like DSL or Tiny Core. Can someone help me get past this so I can install it? Already tried switching to another virtual terminal, killing X, and starting it again to no avail. Need a fix by Tuesday, if possible.

[zerozero]

what is the ram in that dell? i'm trying to find some specs about it and what i see is that it either had 256 or 512MB ram.
i believe that even 512 is tight to install mint

[hxr.keltz]

what is the ram in that dell? i'm trying to find some specs about it and what i see is that it either had 256 or 512MB ram.
i believe that even 512 is tight to install mint

It's 256, but the hard drive had a 2 gb swap partition which had gotten mounted already.

I just got it to start and install using Compatibility Mode, (I feel kinda dumb for not noticing it before) but now I'm left wondering why practically every other distro would have this problem, even in their own compatibility mode. Any ideas?

[zerozero]

probably we are comparing apples with trees were the other distros also "lightweight" as the mint xfce you are trying now?

[hxr.keltz]

Heh, possibly. I tried everything from Puppy to Ubuntu, even Arch. (which I rather liked, in all it's minimalistic glory) The DE's included XFCE, LXDE, Unity, Enlightenment, Openbox, etc.