Am using Debian Potato thinking it best for hardware - but occurs to me I don't really know. What would really be best?

Hardware: two computers ethernetted together, sharing the load. Roughly: one 75MHz Pentium, 24MB RAM; other 125MHz Pentium, 16MB RAM. Thanks any help.

I think Slacware 10.1 running Fluxbox or XFCE would do perfect on those two machines. Also since you won't be needing Gnome or KDE you wont even have to download the second CD unless you want the 2.6 Kernel.

i myself have an old pentuim 166 box with 32 megs of ram. So far I have used slackware up to current and debian sarge with the 2.4 kernel and freebsd 5.3.
All of wich with the fluxbox gui and dillo to browse the web if i need to. You have a lot of options really. I haven't tried any distrobutions that use .rpm packages like SuSE or Mandrake, but I suppose you could do a minimal install of those as well.

If you've got broadband access, you might just try installing Debian Sarge using the Debian-Installer, from the "businesscard" image.

When package selection time comes, just don't select any and do the minimum install. After that's completed and you've logged in to a pretty bare system, just apt-get install what you need.

If you're *really* a minimalist: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Any distro without an interface will do for the 75 mhz (which makes a nice mp3 player at 22 khz ). As for the other, more memory will definitely turn it into a graphic workstation, but using a light window manager could be enough (e.g. Blackbox).

You can try Damn Small Linux, it just reached 1.0 version. It's very usable, and it's based on debian. It's a livecd but you can install to hard drive as well.
And you can enable apt-get anytime and make it into a debian system.

DSL comes with Kdrive, a very small X server (which is probably needed on your computers). It's quite hard to set up in pure debian, in DSL it's already set up for you. Other very fast applications are also included.

Don't be surprised that it does run slow from CD, try installing it on the hd.


Otherwhise you can always try Deli Linux, debian, slackware, ..
I have a page on debian, I run debian on my p1 166mhz 64mb ram. http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure/tech/linux/debian.html

I have a lot more ram then you do have though. But here's an article about someone who runs about the same system on a p75 and 16mb ram: http://www.pycs.net/lateral/stories/4.html

Huge thanks all. Probably try Sarge first and hdparm sounds a good idea.