Installing Linux on a 10 year-old Packard Bell PC
 

Howdy and Welcome J.D.

I assume you meant 64MB RAM:p. Your system is an extreme case so after hard thinking I'll be suggesting you to try Slitaz Linux OR Puppy Linux in your punny 5GB hard disk, these 2 must be the best bets acc. to me.

http://www.slitaz.org/en/

http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%...%20Started.htm

You'll be able to do pretty much anything with Slitaz and Puppy linux, but 64MB Ram is what may cause a crying for speed system.
Good luck.

that is a very low spec 10 year old box
i have a DELL from 2001 that has 1 gig of ram( 512 when new) and a nvidia gforce 2 card and a pen4 cpu
that i have SL 6 beta on

BUT your 64 meg ram box ???
try "puppy Linux "
or
" Damn Small Linux "

I'd put an extra stick or two of RAM in it regardless of what distribution you choose, assuming the motherboard can take more. For a machine that old, RAM will be dirt-cheap (or free if you can find someone chucking out a similarly old machine) and will make a world of difference if you're surfing the web or watching YouTube.

Google your BIOS string (that long sequence of characters that appears on the POST screen when you start up your computer) to determine the exact model of your motherboard and thus the maximum amount of memory it can take, and then cram it to capacity!

For what it's worth, up until a couple of years ago, I myself was using hardware that was about ten years old to do exactly the things you want to do --- but I ran Slackware on my old boxes. ...Though as the other posters say, on a 5GB drive, I'd go for Puppy or DSL.

Good luck!

If you go with puppy use one of the 4.31 retro iso, create a swap partition and do a harddrive install. A fugal install will be exremely sluggish with that amount of ram. I don't think lucid puppy will even run on that amount of ram.

not so , there is a small supply left and a decent demand
i was not willing to buy 2 gig of ram for an old box

but installing 512 meg looking at $25 us to $50 us

Going on the specs, I very much doubt that the kind of RAM you're talking about is the kind of RAM he's looking for (his machine is extremely unlikely to be able to take 2GB) --- I'd guess he's after a couple of 256MB sticks of PC100/PC133.

Over here people simply throw out machines of the sort of spec he's describing, RAM and all...

...In fact, all bar one of my old Linux boxes were rescued from skips (UK/US translation: "skips" = "dumpsters").

Ah, them were t'days! :)

I actually have the same specs as his computer. It can take a RedHat Linux 9.0, but as for the memory, 64 MB ram is small so a graphical linux make slow it down. The amount of ram it can take depends on the motherboard. If its a Biostar mother board, the max it can handle is 256 MB of ram.

There may be a hard drive limitation on it too. The largest hard drive that board may take would be 32 GIG hard drive. There are ways to take more, but if your just learning linux, 32 GIG is fine for now.

So, did the original poster decide what to do with is old box?

Red Hat 9 is very outdated and gets no security updates and bugfixes. Please do not recommend such an old distro, it just is a security risk to use it.
Also, the amount of RAM a mainboard can handle is not determined by the brand, but by the memory controller/chipset that is used on a mainboard.

There are ways to harden old distros.

If the machine isn't online all the time, Red Hat 9 is okay. I said that is what my machine had at the time. I did not say "I Recommend Red Hat 9" just that is what I had installed on my AMD-K6. Newer distros would just eat up more resources. Red Hat changed to Fedora, if thats correct.

For ram, that is correct, its the memory controller/chipset that determines maximum ram.