I'm about to inherit a very old Pentium 166, 32MB ram that my girlfriend does not want to put to waste. I told her it would make a great Linux box because there are several Linux distros that it can handle.

Alas, I only know DamnSmallLinux, FeatherLinux, and Morphix. I'd like to have a mostly complete Linux distro with a GUI (I'm a GUI whore, don't give me console only distros, please) and so far Morphix looks like a winner. I'd like opinions from the experts though. Does anyone have any other suggestions? I'll mostly be doing browsing, FTPing, some image viewing possibly and playing music (XMMS can handle that just fine, methinks). Currently I'm a fan of FluxBox but XFCE looks like it would suit my tastes better (I've yet to check it out though...)

I have no knowledge of installing desktop environments but if I can have a good distro and someone teach me a very simple and easy way to install FluxBox/XFCE (or any other simple and quick desktop environment) on it, I'd be eternally grateful. Otherwise just recommend me already packaged small distros with FluxBox, etc. and I'll check em out.

Ready and easy-install distros are much preferred, however I'm not too shy to experiment if it would really make it worthwhile.

Help? Thanks in advance!
p3ngu!n

man... learn console...
floppyfw.. or zipslack, but you -have- to get on some console... that's really the way to go with slower boxen... i have a pentium 120 that runs floppyfw for my router.. and a ppro 180 for my mp3 server... do it some.. and you'll thank me for it..
console. seriously.
check out O'Reilly UNIX in a nutshell.. for some command help.. it's like a bible.

slax is good, it is based on slackware 10, and it comes with KDE 3.3.0, and fluxbox.
To install, use fdisk to partition your hard drive, then run slax-install to install it. The 180mb image can fit on an 8cm CD.

Wow, slax seems very good! I'll be checking it out, thanks!

Slax is great, it's the only live cd I use because the minicdrw's fit so nicely in my wallet And it uses VESA as it's vid. driver, which works on virtually any PC.

I'll agree slax is a good choice.

You need a light weight window manager rather than a full blown DE. Slax uses fluxbox so this fits the bill nicely.

Hang on wait a minute the requirements of slax are :

Memory

30 MB to boot slax.
64 MB to run Xwindow with fluxbox (guifast)
128 MB to run Xwindow with KDE (gui or guisafe)

therfore you would be stuck with the console only as you only have 32MB of RAM

You should be Ok with Damn Small Linux though.

Regards

Shmonkey

.
.
You might want to check out this link:

http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

PM
.
.

I have a IBM 350c 486-25MHZ 16MB ram 200MB HDD and it runs slack 4.0
with X and mwm as the window manager ( no GUI ) it can also run netscape 3.0 (from mu-linux)
works fine for reading documentation and learning programming C I also have slack 9.0 running on a machine like you discribe and it runs kde faster than it runs win95 what matters most is the hard drive space so what distro you can run depends on how much space you have

have you ever tried damn small?

I was somewhat impressed with Byzantineos, not sure if that'll fit the bill for you as I'm a noob but none the less it was an impressive little OS for the size. Plus as a live CD you can pull the cd-rom out, nice feature if you're just looking for a computer to browse with. I would assume you could boot it up, pull the cd and run it until you were forced to shut down again. Also, more ram on eBay should cost more then $5-$10, would be a good investment.

Adam