Hi all,
I have a few old boxes that have a pentium-s 166 and windows 95 installed on them. Windows is giving many problems booting as these machines have been grounded for awhile. Any suggestions for a very basic linux distro that should work well on such an antiquated piece of hardware?
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Thanks

Moved: More suitable in our Distro forum where this is asked all the time.

Try Slackware or any other lighter weight distro. Don't expect X to be fast though on some of the later distro's or using KDE or Gnome, use Fluxbox or any other lighter desktop environment and you'll be ok.

I also have a few older computers that I would like to convert to linux. One is a Pentium 166 and the other is a 266. They are running windows 98 and being used as servers. One is a pop3 email server the other is a bit torrent tracker (PHP-Apache-Mysql based). The tracker is the 266 , it has 90 mgs of ram and a 5 gig hd. The 166 is a 3 gig hd and 32 ram.
They are networked to 2 other windows xp computers with a linksys router. If I like what I see in the servers I may end doing them . But I love games and I have a feeling I will be having at least 1 windows box for awhile.
Thing is I have never installed linux and it appears from what I have read to be a dreadful task. Even so I think it would be worth it to get rid of the "Blue Screen of Death" the tracker gets every once in awhile. After reading and reading I was going to try Debian. But are there other distros that would be better for my purposes?
Thanks for any help.

How about doing a hd install of something like damn small linux? Or vector linux? Both of these work quite well on older hardware. If your looking for ease of installation, mandrake would be the way to go, even though I'm not sure how that would run on such old hardware. It does come with icewm, which is an okay "lightweight" desktop manager.

Thanks for the answer, sorry it took so long to write back. I tried the distros you mentioned and maybe its just me but I am lost in linux. I tried a lot of distros including

Libranet - the best so far on the old system IceWM isnt that bad.
Debian - They will never replace windows if they rely on average people trying that install nightmare.
Fedora- pretty but slow as hell
Mandrake - It dosnt see my CD drive
Vector - It didnt like my CD DRive either
Clark Connect - OMG this was close to what I wanted but it has a goofy web based interface that runs slow as a snail and no desktop.

Maybe I didnt ask the right question, if nothing else installing and learning a lot about Linux was fun. I can see in a few years it will be a force to be recond with, just a few problems to finish off like install and installing programs to the point where avrage users can do it.
But I have learned and the thing I learned is to ask the right question. The Question is . Is there a disto that can turn an old computer into a web server with Apache - PHP - Mysql installed and set up so that even a complete linux newbie could install and run it?
Thanks again for any help.