Hey guys, it's me again.
Yeah so as the title says, it's a really old pc but it has decent memory for something built in the ninteys (in case you're wondering, I think 20 to 30 gigs) so yeah.

I considered puppy Linux, but it's not my taste. I don't like the Looks of the GUI. That's very important to me.

If you need the computer make and model, here it is. It is a Gateway 2000 4DX2-66. Pretty old, yeah? If you need pics just say and I'll take some asap.

Thanx, SwiftSkii

On a 486-66, I'm not so sure, but Slackware might be worth testing. It does not waste resources, but KDE 4.x would probably drag. An older Slackware, such as v. 10 or so, would probably work okay. V. 10 is still available at a lot of the Slackware FTP sites.

I was running Slackware 12.2 on an IBM PC 300 (original Pentium 300 MHz) with 384 MB RAM and an 8 GB HDD quite successfully. I have no doubt that Slack current would run on it, with this caveat. The chip can handle audio, but not video.

WoW 20~30 Gigs of RAM! that is good, I think you mean storage , memory has a technical meaning what is different to what you likely think it means. Pictures will not really help as much as the actual specs, how much RAM does it actually have, etc.

I'm a newbie- so my opinion may not be valid- but if it has 256MB of RAM, Lubuntu (Lite-Ubuntu with Lxde desktop environment) seems like it would work to me. It's very similar to Ubuntu, but much more minimalist.

Yeah but would it help if I took a pic of the guts?

I dunno about what the first awnserer was talking about, but I looked on the site and I was like OMG 6 CDS?!?

But I will try that ubuntu lite. I have a laptop that is a little bit better than the crap box that Linux is intended for, and I can boot it up in less than a minute. I will get Ubuntu, then Ubuntu Lite, and if none of those work, I'll go with Puppy Linux. I am either going to sell this comp or somehow get it wireless.

In fact, I was thinking about getting XP but right now it is running 95 and that is really slow, so I guess I'm better off getting Linux.

Thanx guys!!

Wait...
Could I possibly load an early version of Mac? Would that work, since I am running on an Intel processor instead of a G3. Would this still work for the early versions that apple has got on their site?

It would be very impressive if people could figure out the specs from a picture of the guts. While some hardware may have the specs on them, there I doubt this exercise would give any meaningful information at all, more so from a machine that is as highly dated as this.

You should be able to gain most of this information from BIOS so I would advise checking there and writing down the information the machine has. It should tell you how to enter BIOS when you boot the machine up.

damn small linux ?? might ?

a few years back i was unsuccessful in replacing a win 95 box
there was to little ram for even DSL

you might want to look at "distrowatch" for old
http://distrowatch.com/search.php?ca...ld%20computers

but Puppy needs 64 meg of ram

DeLi Linux might
"DeLi Linux is a Linux distribution for old computers, from 486 to Pentium MMX 166 or so"

Nope, It would not work at all. Apple limits the the drivers in Mac OS very strictly to begin with, early versions of Apple OS are not built for the Intel architecture and will not run on such a processor (the actual instruction sets are fundamental different between the PowerPC and Intel processors). Also I believe when Apple did switch to Intel they switched to 64-bit processors, tho I might be wrong on the very very first Intels but generally as far as I am aware what was built only works on the 64-bit architecture anyways. So you are stuck to probably either that time dated Unix, DOS or Windows, or a very very cut down linux distribution... that is designed for legacy hardware.

SwiftSkii, it would be great if you post its real hardware configuration.

Lol, i just got it yesterday. So i know nothing about it, and i had to go to sleep right after considering i found it at about 9 oclock at night, played with it till 11 and then went to sleep. Even as i am posting this i am not at home. And when i was playing with this thing, i didnt know how to get to the specs without a mouse because i dont have a PS2 mouse. More of a USB User.

So yeah, i will try DSL, about to look at the site.

I was like "Forget Ubuntu, it wont even work." so it will be DSL, Lite-Ubuntu or Puppy Linux.

Thanx Guys, SwiftSkii

try AntiX

Hey guys, Thanx for your help. I have picked puppy linux even though i dont really like the GUI. I am going to sell it and most people are familiar with Windows and it looks like that.

But.
I'm having another problem.
When i tried to change the boot order through BIOS, it said there was no CD drive drivers installed. But there was. I know becuase i inserted a CD that i found (I have about 200 sitting by my bed, and i pulled out 1 that was a data CD. Lucky Me!) when windows was booted (98' That is) and it noticed the CD. So i was like "Huh?" so i went back into BIOS, and it said that i could boot from a Floppy (I think it was a floppy, it just said "diskette")

So is there any programs that you can boot from a floppy that lets you boot from a CD drive?

Anyone?

A quick qoogle found the max spec for RAM at 64MB. As stated you should be able to find out how much is actually installed from the BIOS or from the 95 control panel in the system folder. I assume that you actually mean MB not GB in your first post. You probably have between 200 and 500 MB of hard drive storage space if this was an original drive.

FYI the min requirements for XP is a P-233 @ 300MHz Min RAM 64MB, 128MB recommended. IMHO its not going to work. Also this computer can not boot from CD.

deli, DSL or slackware are good choices. lightweight ubuntu is probably not practical with this computer. Someone did get puppy to run on a 75MHz PC with 40MB RAM but the min requirements are listed as a P-166 with 128MB RAM.

PS took me to long to type this up. UNetbootin might work.
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

In retrospect, I now wish that I still had my old IBM P2 500Mhz/8G HDD/196MB/WIN98 machine! Sold it 2 years ago, because there was no WIN98 support for any of my newer devices....and the 3GHZ/150Gig HDD/1Ghz/Vista machine I replaced it with, is in reality, hardly any faster. Had I been into LINUX back gthen, I would have just put one of the minimalist distros on the old machine (which always functioned flawlessly- and still is, I'm sure) and could have gotten another 9 years out of it! (Oh well...I got $200 for it...so it was hard to resist)