another "which distribution for an old computer" thread

I'm sure you have all seen posts like this before, but I havn't been able to find what I need. I have an old Hewlett Packard computer with a 500 MHz Celeron processor and 192 megabytes of ram. Right now I'm running Red Hat 9 with KDE (yes, I need a GUI) and it's mighty slow. I would like a lightweight and fast distribution, but it needs to come with packages, libraries etc. Disk space is not a problem (120GB hdd). What distro should I use?

RH should be fine, it's your GUI that's weighing you down. Try something lighter like Fluxbox.

Or you could always go with Slackware and see if it has a feel you like, contrary to popular belief, it too has a packaging system that works great (pkgtool).

Cool

Before I upgraded at the first of the year I was running a Celeron 500 with 256 RAM.
Using Debian Woody I could run MPlayer and very rarely receive a "your computer is too slow to play this" message. Using Suse 9.1 I could not run MPlayer at all while in KDE. If I switched to ICEWM I could use MPLayer just fine. To me this was a great example of what was using my computer resources.
It is more important that you consider using ICE or Blackbox or such to be able to use the programs you want. A switch to Slackware or Debian should give you a faster base at the price you need to do more configuration.
You may want to check out something like Vector Linux for a low resource system or get radical with a Damn Small Linux hard drive install.
Good Luck

OLD? lol
Try Debian sarge
Easy to install, use, customise and maintain.
http://www.debian.org/distrib/

I've started to install Debian before, but I had trouble partitioning and gave up. I could try Slackware though.

I tried to install Debian a while back (a bit before what I would consider my "understanding" point) and really got lost. I've heard it's installer has improved, and would love to give it a try again, but I've been happy with the other things I've tried since and have no reason to look back. But, if you are just getting your feet wet, it may be worth your time to give it another shot. It's well supported, and has literally thousands of packages for it.

Just a thought, depending on what you plan on doing long term, it may be worth your while.

Cool

As the other posters have suggested, it probably doesn't matter which distro
you choose... it's the Window Manager that 'weighs more' in a lot of cases

My personal preference for a reasonably light Window Manager is XFCE4

For Debian:
# apt-get install xfce4

Have fun ... experiment!
With a drive that size you should be able to leave enough space for other
distros when you want to try something different (and when your experience
increases to that stage), or even choose different window managers when
you log in.

hey friend, is the drive formatted as fat32? If it is, try out Amigo Linux 2.0, as it takes up little space (200 megs) and is based on slackware 9.1, so all slackware 9.1 packages will work with it. The creator has a forum here as well, and will help you if you have the info handy. Trust me, the GUI is also simple to use.

No, it's ext3. If one of you guys could explain how to resize partitions, i would appreciate it. Here is the output of parted for my drive-

(parted) p                                                                
Disk geometry for /dev/hda: 0.000-114473.460 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor    Start       End     Type      Filesystem  Flags
1          0.031     99.914  primary   ext3        boot
2         99.914 113449.218  primary   ext3        
3     113449.219 114472.968  primary   linux-swap  boot

I would like to make partition 2 smaller.

thanks

1. If it's only the swap you want resized, you need to either turn swap off
or boot a LiveCD. Turn that swap off with:
# swapoff /dev/hda3
Then use fdisk to delete the partition:
# fdisk /dev/hda
: d
: 3
Create a new partition:
:n

:3
:<ENTER> (start sectors)
:+512M (new size)
Create another partition:
:n

:4
:<ENTER>
:<ENTER>
Write and quit
:w
Then make your partition into a swap and turn it on:
# mkswap /dev/hda3
# swapon /dev/hda3
Do something useful with your new partition:
# mke2fs -j /dev/hda4
# mkdir /mnt/newpart
# mount /dev/hda4 /mnt/newpart

2. If, however you wanted to resize your root (hda2) you would need to
boot using a CD that has ext2resize (your guess is as good as mine).
I suspect Knoppix might have it.
You then resize the filesystem, resize the partition, dummy resize for
sanity, and then do a filesystem check.

3. To create more than 4 partitions you will need to learn about extended
partitions (no big deal)

Thanks UBERnut, i'll try a live cd