BeaFanatiX has been a great help to me. I have been using a lot of old parts recently for PC assembly and BFX is so good that I have been able to have a good push to get these PC's up and running....

Benefits: works on old pc's very well. Great, quick boot livecd. Seems to be a blend of Knoppix and Ubuntu with smatterings of other stuff thrown in. Presentation is very Windows-ish for a gnome desktop...that can be a real plus when trying to get Windows users to switch. Very adjustable, great install interface, installs within about 20 minutes. Very impressed.

That being said, always looking for good distro's to use with this older stuff, so am open to suggestions. I use Ubuntu Edgy on my PC and have been using it for a while, but my pc has some good hardware. But for the older stuff I've tried Fluxbuntu (sorry, but no Window's user is going to enjoy switching to Flux-box, even though it has a good look to it), SAM (pretty good), Mandriva One (touch and go...some of my stuff is too old), and a variety of others.

The hardware that I'm dealing with is Pentium II and III, various memory, hard drives around the 1-10 gig range, usually. But this all varies...

I have checked out and liked BeaFanatIX. I have not personally checked out DeLi, but I suspect it is also a very tight, light distro.

Vector Linux
http://www.vectorlinux.com/

DSL
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Puppy Linux
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=3

Slackware
http://www.slackware.com/

SLAX Live CD
http://www.slax.org/

Elive:
http://www.elivecd.org/

Deli
http://delili.lens.hl-users.com/

Luit Linux
http://luitlinux.sarovar.org/

hope this Helps,

Jake

jacook, can you please stop telling people to use VL 4.3? The requirements for 5.1 are pretty much the same (well, it needs a little more harddrive space), but there's a lot more packages available for it and it's going to be much easier to get help for a more recent version if needed. A lot of (perhaps most) folks on the forum have joined only after the 5.0 SOHO and 5.1 Standard releases (like me) and therefore no clue about any odd quirks that might have been in 4.3.

Here's a nice comparative table for your viewing pleasure. It's a shame the latest stable version (5.8) isn't on it (yet??).

I don't see you posting version numbers for other distro's, so why recommend some old version of VL?

fine I'll fix it, the only reason I reccomend it is Because I haven't seen the latest Version

Jake

Thanks, all! I'll check 'em all out...played with DSL this weekend and, although I'm more adept at KDE and gnome over fluxbox, I still liked the feel of DSL. Of the fluxbox ones I've used, it was definitely the smoothest.

But I'll try the others...took apart the laptop harddrive this weekend to see if I could put it in a slightly more recent one with a cd player, but it didn't fit, much to my dissapointment...oh, well, I'll keep playing.

Thanks!

Thanks .