Hi, i just got this cheapo laptop with only 48mb of ram. yes, i put 32 in the subject but who counts in 48's anyway? And i was wondering if any good linux distributions are out there that can work with this much. I checked Mandrake and Redhat but their requirements are too high. As you can guess, i'm a real newbie and i'm not too familiar with any of the other distributions. was hoping to learn linux with this cheap laptop

Try Knoppix http://www.knoppix.net/

20 MB of RAM for text mode, at least 96 MB for graphics mode with KDE (at least 128 MB of RAM is recommended to use the various office products),

When you start up GUI's your looking at heavy stuff, although other GUI's use less memory 40Mb is not enough now.

MOst of the others reccommend at Minimum 64Mb.

Just an idea.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis...ions/baslinux/

BasicLinux is a mini-Linux that runs in a 4mb ramdisk. It has a fully-featured shell, an easy-to-use editor, and a variety of useful utilities. In particular, BasicLinux is well equipped for internet use: it can dial an ISP, browse the web, send/receive mail, and download files.
BasicLinux is a good distribution for an old 486. It is much leaner than RedHat and performs better on old hardware. Although BasicLinux initially runs on a ramdisk, it can be installed to its own HD partition, where additional packages can be added (including X and GCC).

I'm running Red Hat 7.2 on a system with 32MB of RAM and only a 200 CPU. I can run a lot of open programs at once: a terminal, opera, gimp, etc. No problems.

On an older system, you just can't use GNOME or KDE. Most window mangers work great such as icewm, Window Maker, or fluxbox.

Vector Linux is famous for running on low-spec machines.
http://www.distrowatch.com/table.php...ibution=vector

Well,
Mine's a Pentium III 600 Mhz machine with 80 Mb RAM. How fast (or otherwise) will gnome, kde.... (or other managers ) run on this machine........ I'm really eager to switch to Linux and Redhat 9 is currently the only distro avilable to me.

Slackware has also very low hardware requirements. It runs on a system with 486 or better, RAM 8 MB or more, and is making the effort to provide the ability of really old and slow machines to run it.

40 Mb of RAM are enough to run Window manager like Fluxbox or Windowmaker and there are also some desktop environments that run quite smooth on slow machines. However if you want KDE or Gnome you must think about 128 Mb RAM, although they will run on 64 or even less ( if we can call this running).