I am running a HP Pavilion 304n PC

Intel Celeron 1403MHz
256MB PC133 SDRAM(Supposed to be 384 but my 256stick reads as 128)
37.2 hard Drive
16x DVD Drive
16x8Dual DVD Burner
and I have DSL

I wonder whats a good Linux distribution to use....

I tried SuSE 9.2 DVD but it tells me :
Kernel panic: Out of memory and no killable processes...

Hmmm, Similar to my setup. but I am running AMD 1.2. I know it's slow by today's standards but hey.... have mouths to feed.

Anyway, Are you running windows now? Have you tried Linux before? or any of the Live CD's available. I am kinda biased but I would say try a Mandrake/Mandriva install. It's pretty painless and has been very stable for me. http://www.linuxiso.org/ If your HD has only one partician you will have to resize your existing. Mandrake does have software for Non-Destructive partitioning but I would suggest BACK-UP.

there are some other things you will want to research like how many and what size and type of paticians to make, but find a distrobution you want to install first...

Good Luck

KC

With those specs you can run pretty much any distro you want. When it comes to what your computer can run, that's up to what desktop environment (or wm) you happen to want to use.

To answer the post, however, I would have to recommend gentoo (if you know your stuff), though if you don't mandrake or fedora core are also very good choices.

It depends on how much learning you want to do. I personally love Slackware. If you want to expirence true pain you can try Gentoo

I've also found Fedora to be alright, and I have to mention Debian......

I start newbies off with http://knopper.net/knoppix

AND, I seriously recommend the book "Knoppix Hacks", from O'Reilly, ISBN: 0-596-00787-6 comes with the Knoppix Version 3.4 CD!
(~$16 at http://bookpool.com )

And, tip #35, for AFTER you have installed Knoppix, so that you can run as 'unstable' instead of 'testing'. don't forget to updatedb after you apt-get update && install dist-upgrade and then apt-get autoclean!

For testing and troubleshooting, and fixing computers, and at my demos in all of the stores, where I descend and give out free Knoppix CDs to all the customers, (in Costco, Compusa, BestBuy, Circuit City), I like
Stux, Slacktux, FreesBIE, Morphix, and other live cds that I don't give out, just demo... There are over 233+ liveCDs at http://livecdlist.com

Hi Vinn3Bo1,

I'll go on a hunch that your not a linux guru quite yet... The first piece of advice I can give you is don't try gentoo until you are quite familiar with linux (you'll get very confused and most likely give up, no offence intended to anyone). Second, take a look at how the distro you want to put on manages packages. Debian-esq distros, Redhat-esq distros, Gentoo-esq distros and all the others use different ways to get software onto your system.

Personally I would suggest the Debian based ones since apt (the package manager) is very good at doing most of the grunt work for you, and you rarely run into the "dependancy hell" some people talk about.

Good choices are Knoppix, and Ubuntu. I'm personally getting quite fond of ubuntu!

If you want to go the Redhat-esq route (ie: the distro uses RPMs for software packages) I would suggest SUSE (which can be whiny on installation as you have just noticed, this happend to me once too......), Mandrake, or Fedora.

SUSE is my personal favourite of the lot since once you get it going it is a breeze to work on (nearly everything can be done with a GUI).

Good Luck!

I'd recommend SuSE also. I'm a big fan of SuSE. Lately I've been toying with Fedora Core 3 but I think that either one would suit you well.

Personally I'd take the advice of others here and stay away from Gentoo until you are more familiar with linux. Yeah it's very awesome once you get it installed, but until you are really comfortable with linux it's a beast to install.

perhaps go to this website http://eedok.voidofmind.com/linux/chooser.html

thanks everyone. i chose and installed SuSE 9.1