I was given a 12 year old computer running W95.
The specs were this, Pentium MMX 233mhz processor, 32MB SDram 66hz, 2gb hard drive and a floppy drive, It also has 2 USB ports and a PCI LAN card, it has onboard graphics (4MB)_
I have raided my parts bin and upped the RAM to 128mb's and installed a 20gb hard drive, a CDRW and a 32mb PCI graphics card.

The only problem I have is the 233Mhz processor is the biggest the board can take and so I would like advice on what distro to run on it.

What do you plan on doing on this computer?

I dont really know.
It was just the challenge to upgrade it and get it fully functioning.
If I can get a reasonably good distro on it I will give it away to anyone who can use it.

The memory will be the show-stopper for most distros... Even Xubuntu says you need at least 192MB. I don't know the light-weight distros well enough to be able to say which would run reasonably well as a desktop on your hardware. Maybe take a look at Damn Small Linux.

You could go with an older version of whatever distro you like that has lower requirements, but then you prob'ly won't be able to run the latest/safest software versions.

Thanks for your answer, I had thought about DSL and Fluxbuntu, but I wondered if any one was actually running a distro on hardware that old.

Still it will be interesting to get a distro up and running.

Well I guess you could run DeLi perfectly on a Machine like this, check it out on Distrowatch, its a Distro made for Machines like yours.

I would try puppy on it.
I haven't tried it myself on a PC that old, but they claim it will run off 32MB just fine:
http://www.puppylinux.org/home/overview

I could install a slimmed down version of Debian with Gnome that would run quite satisfactorily on that hardware. I agree with DeLi as probably the best fit, tho. ... That is not terrible hardware.

I have an old 333 running with 256MB RAM with Slackware 9.1 ... It is a little old considering they are up to 12.1 as of a couple months ago. I am not sure how good 10 will run on it. I have Slackware 10.2 running on a 667 with 768MB of RAM, and it runs flawless, but that is a bit above your hardware configuration. Are you planning upon using a gui or console? You do have a 32MB video card so it should do a gui ok as far as thats concerned. As ranger commented the RAM is going to be your killer. I will do a little more research and see what Slackware 9.1/10.* says for system requirements.

Goodluck,
DragonM15

Minimum System Requirements for Slackware 9.1 is 16MB RAM and a 486 processor. Which is a little bit faster than yours. X requires at least 64MB of RAM, recommended 128MB. Requirements didnt change much in the move to 10.1 besides a little more hard drive space (3.5GB full install). Again this is an older OS, so as ranger stated above you wont have the latest, greatest, and most secure, but it could work.

As you probably could have guessed, I am a little biased towards my Slackware. Although I have heard some very good things about Damn Small Linux. Although I have not tested it myself, I was thinking about testing it out on an old 12Mhz Intel, with I believe 8MB of RAM. I currently has *evil* Windows 3.11 with i belive it was called caldega which changes the gui a little bit to look like Windows 95. An interesting little project, dont you think?

DragonM15

Thanks for all your advice, I already have puppy & DSL on disks, so I am downloading DeLi at the moment, so that will give me a good choice.

Thanks to all for your help.

Any time, thats what we are here for

DragonM15