I have an old Inspiron 4000 with a 500 mhz pentium III processor and 500 mb of RAM and would like to put a current Linux desktop on it. I would also like it connect to a wireless network using a pcmcia card. What distro would run reasonably on this setup?
Any suggestions?
Thanks,

Andy

I'd suggest that you read the Megathread. It's a "Sticky" in the distributions forum. Hopefully, this thread will be joining it soon.

I've tried Zenwalk on a computer like yours, and it worked very well. I've also heard that Vectorlinux is good for such machines. But if you want REALLY light, give Puppylinux a go, which I have tried with a certain amount of success on an old Pentium 1 laptop with only 32 Mo Ram!

I would suggest slackware using xfce, or xbuntu

I think ubuntu would even still be fine or otherwise the lighter xfce based xubuntu http://www.xubuntu.org/

I find your computer not so slow yet by the way, most distro's would do I think. If you have problems, just switch desktop environments/window managers.

Puppy is for really low end stuff like indeed pentium 1's with 128mb of memory.

Go for Vector or Damn Small Linux. Vector being better of the two.

I agree with teek, I am currently using Ubuntu on my Dell with 375 mb of RAM and P.III and it runs great, although, if you have more it might be better.
Also, my opinion on puppy is that to me it is more like Win 95, and not as nice as Ubuntu.

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The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower. Psalm 18:2

Yes, I largely agree about Puppy - it's not really made for modern computers. You either love it or hate it! Of course, it's no where near as nice to use as Ubuntu - the two are incomparable. I actually put Damn Small Linux on the Pentium 1 machine in the end as I found it worked faster than Puppy - I find it less pleasant to use, though.

This is true. Bear in mind that most Linux distros specify a minumum of 128 RAM on a Pentium 111 machine. Linux isn't Windows - even Suse, which is quite a heavy distribution, doesn't require 1Go RAM to run!

I tried Ubuntu already and it was a bit sluggish. It is probably the heavy Gnome desktop manager. Also, it thinks my processor is 500 mhz and I found that it is actually 600 mhz(weird). I think I will try the Xubuntu and see how that works. Right now I have a copy of PCLinuxOS that I am installing onto it until I get a copy of Xubuntu. I am guessing that it will be sluggish too.

Well I tried to install Xubuntu and it came to the partitioning and it wouldn't partition. It gives me an error: "the ext3 file system creation in partition #1 of ide1 master (HDA) failed."
PCLinuxOS worked good actually but now I am going to try the newest Ubuntu and maybe change the desktop manager.

Any suggestions with Xubuntu??

Well, for fun I tried installing VectorLinux on a computer almost identical to yours. To my surprise, it wouldn't install - it got hung up on the video card. I then tried with Zenwalk, a distribution I had heard was good on low-powered machines. Although I had no trouble with the Live Cd, I couldn't actually install the real thing - it appeared to not recognise the hard drive. I could have tried solving these problems, that's what an experienced Linux user would do, but I wanted to see how it would be for a Linux newbie on such a machine. Unfortunately, for me on this machine at least, these two distributions were disappointing. Then I tried Simply Mepis. Oh what joy! This is really very good. The install is very easy indeed, being just as newbie-friendly and straightforward as Ubuntu, and everything was recognised without a hitch. Installed on the harddisk, it runs very well. Quite a surprise for me this. Could be worth a try if you're not satisfied with Xubuntu.

PCLinuxOS is a very good distribution.

As far as getting Xubuntu to work, since PCLinuxOS is already running, you can use gparted (you may have to add that package via synaptic) and partition your HDD ahead of time. That way when installing Xubuntu, you can go into the advanced partition menu, and just specify the mountpoints, instead of having the installer autopartition your HDD.

The *buntu's autopartitioner also has a habit of creating a new swap space instead of using an existing one, so this method is better overall.

Sounds like you've got a good selection of options to choose from, that people have already suggested here. I wanted to add that Zenwalk worked very well for me on a Toshiba 400MHz Pentium III laptop with much less memory than you have, and a 6GB harddisk. It was slow, but that's because the laptop's slow as all get out anyway. Otherwise it worked fine; it played DVD's and did most other normal stuff that I can think of. I personally didn't care too much for Zenwalk itself, but I'm biased (Slackware) but atleast it did work well.

[QUOTE=siawash;2915675]Thanks for that. The thing is as i mentioned earlier my long term objective is to become an expert in linux, hence slackware. What I think i will do is to purchase slackware live cd. If it recognises my phone and voice recorder usb interface without too much bother, I will go for it. Otherwise I will opt for Ubuntu.

On the other hand, I guess with all distro one can opt to switch off the gui and work from vi editor and that way learn from the command prompt...right. ?
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in slackware that's usually the default startup. In slackware you can learn a lot, but also have to configure things more than in other distros, it's like a do it yourself distro, and it is excellent.

[QUOTE=ode;2924057]I agree with everything you said.