I am playing around with Puppy Linux Wary 5.3 on an old machine (Pentium PII, 160 megs RAM, 6 gig HD). I did an install on the HD. I appreciate it's light footprint, the fact that it plays nice with the graphics card (Slacko Puppy and Precise did not) but am dismayed that it is very unlike Unix. No passwords (even when I set one up for root it still logs in automatically), no man pages (it actually tries to open a web-browser with google, the machine BTW is not networked) and most of the command line Unix user-land seems to be MIA.

I guess I can slowly configure it to my liking, but this would likely take a lot of time and this is certainly not my primary machine. I am wondering if there is a variant already set up which feels and behaves in a more traditional Unix style, with greater emphasis on the command line and less on the graphical side. I intend to use it mainly from the command line. Should I stick with Puppy and configure it or go for a minimal/ lightweight install of Slackware or possibly one of the BSDs that I would use mostly from the command line.

SliTaz? TinyCore? AntiX?

Kind of hard to say. It could be possible to do most of that in some version of Pup.

I might be tempted to try some of the other "made for older hardware" distro's. You are kind of at the limit of usability for a window manager. If you want you can use many other distro's in text mode. There are only a handful of distros that would be for that system. Each gives up something.

Additionally, life is full of compromises. You want a linux that will run well on extremely outdated hardware. Do you also want a linux that will run well on extremely outdated hardware with security "best practices" in a mission-critical multi-user environment?

http://shino.pos.to/linux/downloads.html

Might help maybe?