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Howdi all im looking for a distro that i can install onto my old pentium 1, 32MB RAM, 10gig hdd, 2MB video.I will need to access the computer from a windows network and pclinuxos07.
You're going to get quite a few differing opinions in response to this question; here's mine.
Almost anything should be fine, so long as you don't install a GUI. I have a similar spec server running at my parents' house and I installed Slackware (no X). I use ssh to log in, and share files with the other PCs (Windows XP) in the house using samba. Seems to work well.
This was one of the first things I did after installing Slackware 12.0 a few months back. I didn't use KDE at the time because my video card was an old Geforce 2 GTS Ultra, and the GUI was rather sluggish, especially without a swap file(oops, didn't set that up when I installed).
Anyhoo, I have been using shoutcast server on that machine.
I made a standard user(didn't run shoutcast server as root), and even pointed a subdomain on my externally hosted website to the shoutcast server. Pretty nifty.
I agree with pwc101, you'll be fine so long as you don't want to use a GUI. I had a fine time just using ssh to remotely log in and start the server whenever I wanted it going. It was really quite painless once I learned the CLI better(I had been away from Linux for like 12 years).
Getting Samba running wasn't too tough either.
Last edited by cornmeal2k; 05-12-2008 at 03:56 PM.
Reason: more info
I'd say go with Slackware, and you might try using Slack 11 because you don't need HAL, Dbus, or a 2.6 series kernel. Since it doesn't need X, you don't need any window managers either. You won't be printing, so you don't need CUPS. You probably won't have to compile anything so you don't need the "D" series. No big editors like EMACS or TEX, either. I'd also say that 32 MB is probably not enough for MySQL, but you don't need a full-blown LAMP setup. Just Samba and ssh.
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