Hi! I have Pentium 1.2 Ghz with 128 MB RAM and a pretty small HDD - 6 GB. I tried so far Mandriva 2005 and SuSe 10.1. Mandriva worked OK-ish but still was slow. SuSe, being relatively new and demanding distro almost made my PC freeze so I want to get rid of it.
Please, give me a piece of advice which distribution (running on KDE, preferably) that does not require compiling the kernel by myself (like Slackware) would be most suitable for my case? I don't need to have the latest version of the distribution, but still to be available for download. I also have Fedora Core 4 on a CD. Do you think it is worth giving it a try?
Also, what is your opinion -- which is the best proportion to partition my HDD (6 GB) in order everything to work fine?

Thanks in advance!

Itso

About partitioning: 256 MiB for swap and the rest for / will be rather fine for the home machine.

Mandriva, SuSE and others user-frendly distros have many daemons running which should make "easy" to use them for the newbies (like automounter, etc.). Use ps -eF and turn off all you don't really need. If you really want to use KDE on this machine, turn off as many "pretties" as you can sacrifice (the most resource-exacting are transparency and animation).

The Linux Energizer Bunny question...it keeps going and going and going.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=473458

Wow, 1.2ghz, and only a 6gb hard drive and 128mb of RAM? Last time I had a hard drive less than 60gigs, I had a 200mhz PC(10 years ago). Are you sure its not a 60gig hard drive? The RAM is probably bare minimum for most versions of Linux.

The KDE interface, is probably the slowest of all the desktops, and frankly, I hate it. I've always found the Gnome Desktop faster than KDE, and Xcfe faster than them both. Xubuntu would be a good choice if you ask me...

http://www.xubuntu.org/

IGF

Arow, my question should be interpreted as with which OS I will not have major problems rather than which distro is good? I know that the more people read a thread, the more opinions are presented but my question is to ask about your experience with computers like mine.
I researched a little bit more and came up with another solutions -- Vector Linux and maybe Ubuntu. I know that Ubuntu is Gnome-based, but may give it a try.
Samotnik, the last time I partitioned, I spared about 1 GB for swap partition. Do you think I have to reduce it?
IndyGunFreak, yes, it is 6 GB, not 60 (!WOOOW!) may give xubuntu a try also. By saying that I would prefer KDE, it doesn't mean that I would admire trying something else as long as it doesn't freeze. It was just because I already kinda used to KDE but it's not that big deal after all.

PS. Any ideas where can I find older versions of the above-mentioned distributions?

So your question is "Which distro is good for this machine?" A slightly more specific version of, "Which distro is good?" Yeah, I understood your question. The answer is the same, pick one and be judicious about what you install.

Xubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake might be a little easier for you, as some glitches are still being workded out with the latest release 6.10 Edgy Eft...

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/re...6.1/release.1/

Download the PC(x86) .iso to your desktop, burn the image to a CDR/DVDR(not RW) using Nero, or whatever(make sure you burn it as an image).., reboot with CD in drive, and give it a try. It will run in "live" mode.. Meaning it will run off the CD without being installed. Boot it up, see if all your hardware works ok, or if something doesn't work, come here and get input. You should be able to do just about everything from Live mode, surf the web, check email, etc. But none of your settings will be saved unless you install. Once you restart a live CD, its pretty much erased.

6gigs, wow, thats surprising to me. My first PC was a 133mhz Acer, and it had a 1.8gig hard drive, and that was probably 12yrs ago. Hell the hard drive I have now, on a PC I just built a year or so ago, is 250gigs... Thats kinda average nowdays

IGF

If you can put another 128Mb RAM in that machine, almost any Linux would do, the processor is certainly up to it.

For me, nothing beats the convenience of the KDE (or GNOME if you prefer) desktop, as long as it has enough RAM it's happy.

I know that the RAM is my problem but unfortunately for now I cannot do anything about this. Tomorrow and in the days ahead I will try some of the recommended OS's and hopefully some of them will do the job. If anyone can give some other idea - be my guest!

feather Linux
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/

Vector Linux 4.3
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/

BeatrIX
http://www.watsky.net/

you can find more here

http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributi...Distributions/
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/

Yes, a swap usually make as one through two RAM size.

If you don't set on KDE as a desktop environment, your should try some lightweight window managers like fluxbox, IceWM etc. 128 MiB would be sufficient for them.

I don't know if I 'm doing anything wrong but it is amazingly slow. I have to wait for more than 15 mins after double-clicking on the install icon ofr the install window to just show up and afterwards for another 15 mins on each step. I just couldn't install it. However, it says "recommended ram - at least 64 MB". If I have these problems with 128 MB, imagine how should it be with 64 MB.

So I assume you were having the above problem while accessing the Live CD. The Live CD is always slower, as access times for CD's and hard drives, are dramatically different. Whats the speed of your CD drive?

Personally, I have a 16x52x24x24 DVD drive, and it runs fine from CD. Granted, I have a 2.4ghz processor and 1024mb of Ram.. You may want to look at some of the lighter distros, (Puppy, Feather, DSL etc.)

IGF

With only 128MB of RAM, and LiveCD is going to be very slow.

I would go with something with a much lighter window manager with that small amount of RAM. XFCE or Fluxbox are good options and many lighter distros feature them by default.

Check out DSL or Puppy.

Problem solved. I installed Fedora Core 5 with GNOME and so far it seems to be fine. I had some difficulties with the GRUB boot loader, but I think that now it's all fine.