I'm going to get an old Compaq from a guy at my school. He said it had win95, Pentium processor, 64mb and less ram? 128?, lil harddrive space and someother stuff.

I want to run linux on this machine (win95 uses fat16, slow, old, out of date, sucks). I was reading some reviews and look at pics of DSL (damn small linux), and Puppy Linux, and I'm thinking I'm going to pick DSL.

What do you think?

I'm partial to DSL for a couple of reasons.

It's Debian-based, so it can use apt-get for installing stuff.
It's in constant development (1.4 just came out, I think)
It's easy to install

Just looking at Puppy Linux's documentation made my head hurt. Of course, use whatever works for you/your friend.

go with DSL

<coughs>Slackware</coughs> Really, my Pentium 100 runs fine with it. Vector if you think you are too newbish for Slackware.

Slackware with Fluxbox DE
or SLAX Live CD. Very small, fact and has everything you ever need; KOffice, Messengers and so on even MPlayer (KMPlayer) with Win32codec

Agree w/ others that Slack is best for this system.
IMHO, best is to use Slack on your low-end PC for a dedicated router/firewall .
Slack can do dedicated routing/packet-filtering great here , and you sure can put that 64mb to good use in a LAN without having X dragging things down .

I am quite happy with Puppy Linux.
I will also try DSL and compare these two OSs.
John (ret.)

DSL is Debian-based but Puppy is LFS. Puppy is lightning fast

Actually, imho, both Puppy and DSL are similar in this one respect:
Both are medium-size liveCD distro's that can fit onto most 180-200MB CD-R's once downloaded (even onto 50MB business-card CD-R's and 64MB UISB pendrives!!)

SLAX and the hd-installable ZipSlack can also each be burned onto single mini-size CD-R's.

Large size distros such as Slackware, Vector, ... etc. need one or more full 700MB CD-R's for burning to CD from .iso downloads.

Here are a few minimalist Linux distros that have the advantage of being downloadable even from dial-up connections, and then decompressed onto floppy disks :
- BasicLinux
- DeLi Linux
- The CLI "liveFloppy" standby, Tom's Root and Boot disk
These all can work fine on low-end PC's such as the Compaq PC described.

Puppy Linux has an interesting option:
You can install on a DVD;
At the end of each session, your Puppy is updated right on the DVD!
This means total portability: You carry your OS, Applications and up-to-date Data! This way you don't mess up a borrowed computer.
I am waiting to try this with the soon to be released v1.06.
-- johnvx

DSL all the way, get it on a business card CD too and keep it in your wallet. Linux on the move!

DSL, Slack, or Debian.

m00p m00p!

I have both operating systems, but i'd probably go with puppy. It is way better with programs and features than DSL. You could possibly Trio boot(I'm not sure though, you can give it a shot)

I am sort of a new Puppy user and to be honest with you, I found Puppy performed better on some of my old systems than DSL. Very quick, driver support was there, and it was loaded very nicely with apps.