Wich Distro to use on old computer?
 

I have a relatively old computer, (as in the best non-linux OS it can run is Windows 98, possibly 2000), and I've been trying to find a liux distro that will work on it, until yesterday I had Red hat (7 I believe?) and I attempted to install Debian, it didn't work. So I tried Knoppix, which I had used on another old computer, though not quite as old as mine now, an I liked it, and it screwed up my screen completely with old and new versions of it. So which ones would you reccomend?

(The only reason I even have the old computer is because I got it for free, and it is my only personal computer, and my family would not appreciate me taking XP off of the family computer and forcing then to learn how to use a new OS.)

try a net install of debian and install that but do not select "desktop machine" twords the end of the install.... but rather select only the bare bones

after that you'll reboot to a command prompt at that login as root then type

that setup will run on a computer with a puny 40 megs of ram

There are a number of threads covering this question. First to get any accurate help it would be nice to know the amount of memory - the size of hd - the cpu speed. If as old as you indicated I would guess at starting with Puppy or DSL. I don't have any experience with either but understand they work with minimum requirements.

The problem is that the computer i want to put it on does not have internet. If I'm still looking for what to put on it tommorow I'll post It's Ram and processor speed, I know that it only had like 2 GB of hard drive memory.


Edit: I realized after I had posted this that there were others like it. (The find similar topics thing didn't work). I right now have no way to tell what its speed is, I'm guessing probably somewhere around 500-800 mhz. And Ram I won't even make a guess. I downloaded slax and puppy. So I'll try them and see how they work.

id download dsl too just to see what gui you like best

I tried them both out, I didn't do DSL, but I mayb do that someday when I'm bored, but I really like puppy, slax was pretty slow though, so I don't like it as much.

Slax was slow? I wonder what packages were installed -- Slax is based off of Slackware, which is fairly easy to set as bare-bones as you'd like. You may try 'ZipSlack' which is meant for smaller servers as well.

I'm a big fan of Slackware, have been for years now. Whether for an old K6/2 boxes or a screaming new laptop, it's my first Distro of choice.

Vector Linux
http://www.vectorlinux.com/

DSL
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Puppy Linux
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=3

Slackware
http://www.slackware.com/

BeaFanatIX
http://bea.cabarel.com/

Elive:
http://www.elivecd.org/

Luit Linux
http://luitlinux.sarovar.org/