I could use some suggestions on best way to set up Linux on a Dell Latitute CPi, 266 p2, 64meg ram, 6gig h/d. Spent a day fooling with this and cannot get a reasonable setup so far compared to the speed of M$ 98 on it. Believe it or not kde runs on it faster than xfce even though low on ram. When using xfce cpu is always working. Huge waits starting appz and rpm drake seems really flakey on this machine for some reason. Urpmi seems to work fine. Even the clock is reset each reboot. Any suggestions that would have this laptop run fast with linux would be appreciated. I did have it running Mandrake in the past, forget if it was Mandrake 8.0 or 9.0, and it was reasonably fast. Prefer to stick to a newer version so it still has security updates available, as it will be used on cable modem. To give you an idea of some of the strange stuff I went through yesterday: installed firefox 1.02 via rpmdrake in xfce, took as long to finish as zeroing out the whole h/d using Knoppix. Then it showed in the uninstall list, but was actually not installed on h/d. Tried again using urpmi in kde and it actually installed in reasonable amout of time. Try to start it from the menu, not happening, start it from command line as root no problem. Never had a permission issue installing appz before. Speed and stability is main concern, so can it be done on this old beast with 10.1, or do I have to use an older distro?

The default installation does not enable HDD DMA modes so you should immediately edit /etc/sysconfig/harddisks and UNCOMMENT all of the indicated lines.

Next edit /etc/lilo.conf and add compact to the beginning of the file, then run lilo as root from a prompt.

Be aware that your configuration is EXTREMELY anemic for X windows, let alone Mandrake which assumes greater memory resources at a mimimum.

I'd try one of the distros which are targetted specifically at older machines.

You CAN pare Mandrake down, but you will be somewhat working backwards at this.

The lighter distros start with everything off or not installed, and permit you to work back up as required.

Thanks for the suggestions, unfortunately, first and second suggestion didn't seem to rescue me from swap hell. As per your last suggestion tried a bunch of smaller distros, and it seems Vector 4.3 using Fluxbox is lightning fast on this laptop's hardware. Probably time to get familiar with some other distro's anyway. Strange enough even the clock issue is not an issue with this distro on my Dell CPi.