a Linux for old laptop
 

Im looking for a linux that will work good on a laptop made for win98/NT

Re: A linux for old lap top
 

I would highly recommend a distribution such as xubuntu, slackware (the best in your case) or Debian etch stable.

The reason i recommend that you go with distributions like slack and debian is that bedsides the fact that they are command line based by default you can pair them down depending upon the specifications of the host machine which to me show that the development teams at Salck and Debian have dedicated themselves to making a truly POSIX compatible operating system.

The most important variable is how much RAM the computer has. I have Debian 4.0 running on a 300Mhz laptop with 64megs of RAM. That is too little RAM to use the GNOME desktop environment (it'll load, but is hopelessly sluggish due to constant virtual memory use). I use the lightweight IceWM window manager.

If your laptop has less than 48megs of RAM, you won't be able to use a GUI unless you use very lightweight applications. I've run Firefox on an old 120mhz Pentium with 48megs of RAM, and the results aren't pretty.

If you have less than 48megs of RAM, you'll probably want to start with something like Damn Small Linux, a Debian based distribution with extreme levels of customization to minimize its size.

Damn small linux will probably run a little faster than other distributions depending on the amount of ram.

Slitaz and Damn Small Linux are the lightest. Puppy is pretty light.

More important, as noted above, is the CPU and RAM. If it's 800 MHz and 512 MB of RAM, your choices will be far different from 250 MHz and 64 MB of RAM.

Don't expect the same "out of the box" experience on that laptop. You're not likely to be able to run a newbie distro.

You might try MEPIS antiX 7.2.

That only supports i686, so there is a good possibility that it won't work. It all depends on what the hardware is. It also requires (for practical purposes) 96 MB of RAM.

If it works, that is my recommendation, because you have complete access to the Debian repos.

Ah, if the laptop is REALLY old, then yes, there is a problem.

From the MEPIS AntiX wiki @ http://antix.mepis.org/index.php/Main_Page

Every time a thread like this comes up, people start recommending DSL and Puppy. I doubt that these people have actually used these distributions productively. Don't get me wrong. I especially like DSL, but it has very limited functionality. You can easily turn any recent distribution into one that will run on old hardware - all it takes is a lightweight Desktop - XFCE, or if that is too much: FVWM, WindowMaker, IceWM,...
And a lighter set of applications - which are available for all distributions:
Dillo as Webbrowser
VLC as media player
Abiword for text

You can take a look at the package selection of DSL for inspiration, but I can't recommend it as a productive system.

I agree wholeheartedly.
I just got my hands on a cute little Toshiba Libretto 70CT. It has a 120mhz Pentium and 32megs of RAM. I'm running Debian 4.0 on it with IceWM. I'm even running a fancy looking IceNine/kore-black theme.