We have a 5-computer network at home, 2 Windows XP computers, a Windows 2000 computer, a Windows 98 computer, and my Slackware computer. The problem arises with the Windows 98 computer. It's pretty badly infected with viruses, spyware, Windows 98, and so forth. Needless to say, it's hardly working. The Windows 98 computer belongs to my sister, who's been begging me to fix it, but it proved impossible with what she was working with. I asked my dad for permission to just install a Linux system on it, and he said, "That's probably best."

Now, first of all, I don't know whether or not I want to install a complete-distro on there or not. Her PC is pretty old. It's at 300 Mhz, 32 MB ram, and it's all-around pretty outdated. Now, I've heard of ways where you can install a minimal Debian system on a computer, and let it connect to other computers to run. I was wondering if that's what I should do with her computer.

Now, my computer is pretty outdated as well. I have a 700 Mhz, 256 Mb ram PC, and I'm running Slackware 9.1. Now, since the whole house is networked, I was thinking that I could just have her use my machine, but I don't know if it would be advisable for her to connect to my computer, as it might slow it down too much. I personally run Fluxbox, because it's a light WM, I like how it looks, and it makes my machine run pretty fast, but since my sister is used to Windows, I was thinking I would have her use KDE as it is much more Windows-like. How much would that eat up at my computer?

So here are my questions. What would you advise me to do? Should I install a light-version of Debian on her machine, and let her use mine through that, or should I install a regular Linux system on her machine, and let her use her own machine. If you suggest just installing a whole Linux system on her machine, which distro would you reccomend. Also, could someone please point me to a website where I could learn about how you install something like a light-version of Debian to allow people to run off of another machine? Even if I don't use that on her machine, I'd like to learn to satisfy my own curiosity.

Thanks for your time.

vector linux?

Well that response was pretty vague. Check out VectorLinux. I use it on the laptop below and it works great. The newest version (4.3) is based on Slackware 9.1, but is much easier to use and set-up. As far as the GUI goes it includes 3, FluxBox, a modified IceWM, and XFCE. For your sister I would recommend the modified IceWM. It's modified to support icons (now that I think about it so is the FluxBox) and it looks just like Windows. In fact if you want it to it has a couple of windows xp themes with the infamous start button. It also has a theme call sortofaqua (my personal favorite) that looks like the OSX GUI without the fancy animations. It includes it's own package system but includes the slackware package system and I haven't had any trouble installing slackware pakages (beyond dependency problems).

As far as software goes, for internet it has the Mozilla Suite for web browsing and e-mail or for something lighter it has Dillo for web browsing and sylpheed for e-mail. I would strongly recommend getting rid of Mozilla and downloading Firefox because it's a lot lighter (not that I'm partial, my signature proves that).

For office programs it has abiword for word processing, which can read and write to windows office format or its own, and ABS for spreadsheets and I believe it can do the same.

For multimedia it has XMMS and Mplayer. Also, for some strange reason it has, with the alsamixer, 3 mixer programs.

It also has a couple games, Lbreakout, a Break out clone, and Super Tux, a Mario Brothers clone featuring every geeks favorite penguin.

It also has a program called VASM (can't remember what it stands for) with a bunch of tools in it that will run in both text and graphical mode

There's a bunch of other stuff but I can't think of what it is.

I will warn you that the most intimidating part is that it doesn't boot to X by default. You have to login in text mode then type startx. There is an option in VASM to make it boot into X but I'm not sure how well it'll work since I've never used it.

This is the machine that I've learned most of Linux on and I personally think it's just as easy to use as any of the major user-friendly distros (mandrake, fedora, et.).

a couple last notes I forgot is that it use Kernel version 2.6.7, and for audio it uses ALSA. I've never had any problem with ALSA configuring the sound, but on some systems it defaults to mute for some reason.

EDIT: It requires 835MB to install and at least 64MB for Swap. Usually you need a boot partition but if Vector is the only OS on the system I found that if you put the / (root) partition in the front and select it as bootable you won't need the boot partition, this is what I do and it works just fine (just thought I'd save you a little space).

Wow. I've never heard of Vector Linux, but I'm definitely going to check it out because of your reccomendations. Thanks a lot for your post, Zuggy!