I just picked up a computer for cheap. (under $20) It's an i386 and I was curious on which release would give me the least amount of trouble.

The following is the specs:


CD-ROM, CD-RW or CR-RW Drives - Find Upgrades
Mitsumi Min 13X/Max 32X IDE CD-ROM [Part #5500734]

Hard Drives - Find Upgrades
Quantum 3.2-GB Ultra ATA IDE Hard Disk Drive [Part #5500914]

Motherboards
Intel Waimea 440EX NLX Form Factor Motherboard [Part #4000430]

Processors
Intel Celeron 366 MHz Slot 1 Processor [Part #2503638]
Riser Cards
NLX Riser Card [Part #4000400]
Other
3 Connection Hercules IDE Interface Cable [Part #8002545]
3 Connection Maverick IDE Interface Cable [Part #8002489]
Floppy Drive Cable [Part #8001854]
Maverick Floppy Interface Cable [Part #8002488]
System Restoration 7.9 [Part #7504961]
Universal Boot Diskette for Windows 95/98 [Part #7504713]

Any suggestions would be great because this will be my first attempt with this distro.

Thanks,
John

You don't say how much ram, but a Ce3leron 366 will run Slack 10.0 with KDE, a bit sluggish but usable with 128 MB. Your disk is a bit small, don't try to install both KDE and Gnome

As david mentioned, RAM will be the most important spec on your machine. With a sufficient amount of memory (128MB+) you'll be fine in KDE or GNOME. In my experience I've found KDE to be a bit more responsive on older hardware but YMMV.

If both are too slow you can always check out XFCE, WindowMaker, Blackbox, etc. which will perform a bit better, but software like Mozilla will probably be sluggish no matter what desktop environment you choose.

If you find Slackware 10.0 too sluggish for your tastes, I'd try version 8.1. Versions 9.0 and 9.1 won't perform significantly better than 10.0, but version 8.1 uses the last major versions of KDE and GNOME (2.2.x and 1.4.x respectively) which should be a bit more responsive on that system.

Definitivly do not installd KDE or GNOME, at least not both. I've installed Slack another machine that has a 3gb disk and i only have 800mb free right now :/
It will work very nice as i used to have a Celeron 333mhz with 64mb and it was a very decent system (I once installed Win XP there too, it was a UGLY EXPERIENCE), of course, i had the same and more features using linux and it ran smoothly with it

Peanut Linux, Damn Small Linux, Tiny linux. If you want an X go with Fluxbox.

http://www.distrowatch.com/

I've had Slackware 9.1 running on a very similar machine (Intel 440BX motherboard, Celeron 366, 128mb RAM) and it ran pretty well. KDE was a bit sluggish, but perfectly usable. Took forever to recompile the kernel, mind...

You might want to try Vector Linux, which is based on Slackware - I found it noticably speedier than Slack, even using KDE.

I'd use Fluxbox + mostly command line apps (depending on what you want to do with the box)... everything you need with the pleasure of a mostly text interface, and much less bloat.

I'd stay away from KDE or Gnome, since they're both big and slow. I, personally, like Xfce4.

YOu will learn more in the long run if you run without X at all.

Oh yeah sorry, I have 128mb of memory. What I was debating on doing was turning it into a server. Is that very practical???

That is very practical, in which case you don't even need X unless you'd like to use Mozilla on it from time to time

I would say it is more practical to turn it into a light-weight server (without X) than a desktop. You could certainly make it a desktop though. Just do not use KDE or Gnome.

I've just bought myself a Panasonic Toughbook laptop which has similar specs to the original poster: 233MHz processor, 5gb hard drive, 160Mb ram. At the moment I'm running Mandrake 9.2, using Fluxbox for the window manager and Rox-Filer as a file manager. Booting is quite slow and some programs take a while to start, but it is pretty useable, even with something like OpenOffice.org. (And it's a Toughbook. Magnesium alloy casing. Dude, I have an armoured laptop. How cool is that?)

I'd like to replace Mandrake with Slack, but when I tried to install it I got an error message saying LILO couldn't be installed to the MBR. I would use a boot floppy, but I don't have a floppy drive on the laptop - all I have is a DVD-ROM.

Given that the Mandrake bootloader is installed and works fine, presumably I could alter LILO's config file, install Slack using the existing Mandrake partitions, and point the bootloader at the fresh Slack install... couldn't I? It would be a bit of an ugly hack, I know, but I just want to use the laptop for word processing - I don't really want to spend ages fine-tuning it and getting it juuust right...

If anyone has any suggestions or comments, that would be nice. If not... well, I'm off to trawl the forums!

I would suggest starting a new topic (after searching the forums). Somebody will be able to help you I am sure, but I don't know. Does Mandrake use grub? Not that it would help me answer, I have just had problems installing Slack on a grubbed Redhat machine before. There is an answer to that on the forum though.