Hello. I have an old computer that i want to have fun with. It is a pentium I 180 "pro" with 4 gigs of storage and 64mo RAM. I want to play with linux, learn the more i can. I have some previous "experience" with linux, know basic terminal commands, ive been using fedora on my laptop for a while but got not much time to go ahead and play and also cause its on a fairly new laptop, i didnt want to mess with the expensive hardware!
So ive got 2 distro, mandrake 9.1 and redhat 9.0, i dunno which one i would start with on my old computer! Any preference? Since i have limited space (4 gigs) and i want some latitude to be able to play with (kernel updates, rpm stuff, etc) so that i can learn, what you guys would suggest me?
Thx,
Max

Also wonder if i would have enough space to put 2 OS on it (win 98 and a linux distro) or 4 gigs wouldnt be enough to support these 2.

Any current linux distro will suffer in 64MB ram. Ram is the bottleneck. Choose either Mdk or redhat, both are good distros. But do not choose kde or gnome, since these desktops will demand mem. Choose fluxbox or windowmaker.
You can also download an older version of any of these. Redhat 7.3 has a good reputation. Debian woody will also be very happy in this computer.
LQ has a new iso download section, if you wish to take a look.

Hello. Thx for the reply.
You've brought a good point bout the display (KDE GNOME), i think i would need to get another one like fluxbox.
I have also redhat 7.2 coming from a book (called Guide to Unix using Linux) but i thought it might be too old if we compare what is on the market now. But if you guys think its not a bad version to run on an old computer, i might give it a try.
Max

well, try first the modern ones. If you don't get enough good with it, give rh7.2 a try. This is why having a test machine is a good thing.

You can also ask for advice on creating partitions aimed at performance, here at LQ. But I'm not sure how much will you gain by partitioning.

I've you're thinking of connecting the machine to the internet I would strongly suggest you use an up to date distro and keep it firewalled. If you use an old copy of RH or something you'll probably get rooted very quickly. It's very important you keep your machine secure if it's on the internet, not just for your own sake but for the sake of everyone on the internet, so it doesn't get used for spamming etc.

I set up an old P200MMX with 64MB with Debian Woody for my brother to use and it seems to run surprisingly nice for such an old machine (even running Gnome and Mozilla) I tried RH9 and Mandrake ond the same box and they were unusably slow really (due to the lack of RAM). The problem with Debian is that while it runs nicely, it's not the most user friendly of distros to get set up I found.

I'm still relatively inexperienced with linux.. I've been installing linux partitions on all my computers since 1997, but have mostly just used them as entertainment when I was bored. (So I still have a lot to learn.)

At any rate, Just 2 weeks ago, I tried to put a copy of Fedora Core 2 Test 3 on an old P233, only to discover that the GUI was entirely unusable. Even though this computer does have 64Mb of Ram, there's no way to really use the OS, other than through the command line.

I have litterally had to wait minutes for mouse clicks to register.

At any rate, using Linux on an old box has a parallel with Windows, IMHO, you don't want to install W95 because it's insecure, but installing Win XP sp2 would run about the same speed as water flowing uphill in January in Canada. It's just not going to happen.

Either user expectations have gone up, our patience level has gone down, or the newest OS's are only designed for the newest computers.

Slap on whatever operating system you've got on that old disk, and make sure you've got a VERY good firewall. (-;

(Someone will probably say that's bad advice, but it's still better than using W95!)