I am becoming somewhat confident w/Mandrake 9.0 on my main box, and want to play with my other box with the fluxbox WM. I used to have Red Hat 6.2 & Mdk 7.2, both w/KDE on it so I know it'll do GUI.

I also had Turbolinux on it but don't remember if it had GUI or not.

It's got a soundblaster 16 in it with a 1M video card....I forgot the name but it's common and worked with both the above.

I'm almost thinking about Knoppix 3.1 but don't know if it'll install on that box. In general I expect to go with an older version of something.

How about some -experienced- comments/suggestions?

I'd like something with a decnt installer script...partitioning is no problem.

Mandrake 7.2 (with some upgrades, especially security), because you know it, or Debian (3.0), if you'd like to try something different.

Yes, I'd like t try something different.

I have to boot floppy, but can install off a CD.

...so Deb 3.0 will work, eh?

Good...thanks.

I was considering Red Hat but I am having trouble even finding their minimum CPU/RAM requirements for different versions. It's as if they are hiding that on purpose.

People have sent me to certain docs...but apparently they aren't reading them because although they might have a lot of reqs, they lack having the CPU and/or RAM reqs.

Thx!

Deb will work. So will Slackware.

Actually any Linux Distro (compiled for Pentium-1 class machines) will work, but some of the fancier ones will need a lot of tweeking to get them to install and run at a decent speed.

Knoppix is a pre-configured live bootable CD of Debian + OpenOffice. It will clone to a hard drive but takes about 2.4 Gigs of space when it does. It is a slick way of getting a nicely pre-configured Debian system however.

Unlike MS-Windows, newer Linux distro's don't have to take higher powered hardware. Even though some of the "Fancier" ones do.

I put FluxboxWM + Slackware 8.1 on an old 486DX100-32mb. It works fine.

Pure Debian might be a better choice because it does a good job of building a stable minimum system with only what you want on it. Then is easy to add apps when you need them. I find Slackware is better pre-configured out-of-the-box and easier to configure afterwords as well. It just has a very poor/primitive package managment system.

I would see if you can get some more memory in that thing however, it will be the biggest bottleneck.

I put Debian on it, it took a full 24 hrs. to get it up & running.
A boot takes about 10 minutes...into KDE.

right now I am trying to figure out how to get fluxbox set up to start. I apt-got the .7 version, and have the 0.14 version here. Now I have to upgrade & set it up to start right away.

They may not include CPU requirements because that's not often something that will prevent you from installing the software. Now using it is another matter. :-)

I thought I'd read something a long time ago (about the time I was migrating systems from 6.x to 7.1) about Red Hat's anaconda needing 32MB to do an installation. I may be wrong about that, though. Sure you can't lay your hands on a couple of more SIMMs?

IMHO, a P120 would not be a good candidate for a very recent distribution. Especially if you're considering running X. A P166 isn't very good either. I did RH8 on one and the GUI starts slowly and runs slowly though it is also using an crummy video card. It seems plenty fast enough when you're working at one of the consoles. But doing anything in X is pretty painful. (Starting up OpenOffice was just hilarious but not something I want to do again.) I'm near to inheriting a P200 m'board and I'm certain I won't run X on that either.

Good luck...
Rick

Congratulations on your Debian install. It's not an easy thing to do.

You could have been more selective and not selected KDE to be installed which would have lessened the 24 hour install time significantly. With KDE, you certainly figured out why you want fluxbox (or any other lite-weight WM) on that computer instead. KDE runs very nicely on my 900Mhz-196MB system. You might think about deleting the whole suite from that system. I also would forget Mozilla, and use something like Opera (www.opera.com) instead.

Also do you have about 100 megs of swap space (preferably a swap partition) configured? Do a "swapon -s" and see if anything is listed just to make sure. The last time I had a slow load time on KDE like that, it was trying to deal with a 32 meg system and no virtual swap space. Once I figured that out, I was surprised the OS actually kept running! I guess that says something for Linux.

About the fluxbox startup: I'm new to Debian myself (normally use Slackware), so I'm still trying to learn this stuff too, and have asked this question myself, and haven't got the answer I like yet. Debian seems to have a lot of special commands to do things that other distro's don't have. For example to configure the graphical login thing (xdm/gdm/kdm) to accept a certain wm by default, you use "update-alternatives --config x-window-manager". Real obvious huh. You probably don't even want to do a graphical login anyway on your machine because you end up starting of X twice before you are into your WM. It's time consuming. What you probably want is it to go into fluxbox when you execute "startx". If you figure out how to do this cleanly without breaking the whole structure of this that Debian has set up, let me know. I'm sure they have another cryptic command that just does it perfectly.

PS: Of course this sort of thing is more straight forward with Slackware: Just move some symbolic links around pointing to /etc/X11/xinitrc, but stay with Debian. I think it is better, but only after you learn it.