Got a free old laptop but which distro do i put on it?
 

It's a Compaq Armada 15300m

Specs

Genuine Pentium 166mmx
80 mb Ram
1.5 gig Hd

Now obviously i know DSL will work on it, however I'm going to try to sell it to a cafe surfer So it has to be more user friendly than that. I also try'd Austrumi but i think it had too new a Kernel as it didn't work

Newer kernels are almost always better (for hardware support) than older kernels. So I really doubt that the problem was that the kernel was too new.

upon boot it said "unable to boot - please use akernel appropriate for your cpu"

I also try'd puppy put keep getting a "kernel panic - unable to sync" i beleive thats because of a lack of ram

Your cpu is a i586 and most kernels today are precompiled to i686. It is not that the kernel is too new, it is that it was compiled for a newer cpu.

I think better you check the hardware requirement of the kernel you are gonna try. Because i install fedora 10 with latest kernel and it requires minimum 128MB of RAM and around 10gig of harddisk space, which looks not a good deal for you. You need to look some older distro which can be accommodate in your system and then try to upgrade the kernel. I think it should work.

Lazlow any distro you'd be willing to recommend?

Debian has i486 kernels; it is not as straightforward as Ubuntu, but it can be minimal too, and that's important with your laptop. I think even a new (stable) version of XFCE and a browser (say, firefox 2) will fit on 1.5 GB.
I have installed Debian "testing" on a 2GB stick, but I also installed extra software (music production, yeah! =D) and store personal data on it. So I can't tell if 1.5GB will be enough for useful applications on Debian.
If you do install Debian, make sure to often do "apt-get clean" (or similar, I don't remember it exactly).

Currently trying to install DELILinux it's designed for I486/586 processors and uses Kde we'll see thanks everyone

Puppy supports as old as 386- read here.

No, Puppy runs on as little as 64Mb.

You might just be realizing why it was free. Sounds more like a hardware failure. FWIW, a 166MMX isn't going to be very productive, regardless what distro you may be able to install, anyway. That's a very slow CPU.

I know why it was free, i dont think 166mhz is even a PII, Right? There are plenty of people who don't realize that though, as proof i installed DSL and found some sucker on craigslist to buy it for $30 less than 20 minutes after posting! Delilinux didn't work out, not sure why, any way thanks for everyone's input!

Puppy runs completely in ram if your running "Singer" it will run on 64mb i was trying to run Dingo which is a 88mb the laptop only had 80mb.

Exactly. So when your sucker realizes he got what he paid for, he's going to blame Linux for the P1's lack of functionality in today's world...

Gee, thanks. That's just what we need...

The guy was familiar with Mepis, I doubt highly that he'll blame Linux for his stupidity. It had a working Wifi card and thats what he wanted it for, not my problem he didn't realize what he was buying.

Fair enough. At least you got something working on it. :cool:

Cheers