Please recommend ur fav distro for my compaq presario 1245
if u can, please list a few pros and cons, trouble, cautions,etc. thanks!!!

SPECS
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Processore AMD K6-2 3DNow! 333MHz
Chipset OPTi Viper Max
Memoria di sistema 32MB, espandibili a 160 MB *going to get 128mb stick tomorrow... ***total 160MB ram.
Scheda Video NeoMagic MagicGraph 128XD, 2 MB di memoria video condivisa
Scheda Audio Ess 1869
Display LCD 12,1 pollici HPA 16BIT @ 800x600 native rez, maximum.
Hard Disk Toshiba MK-3212 3.1 GB
CD-Rom Toshiba XM-1902 24x
1.44MB Floppy disk drive
Modem modem software Lucent v.90 56kbps
Porte di connessione 1 seriale, 1 parallela, 1 VGA-out, 1 PS/2, 1 USB, 1 ingresso audio, 1 uscita audio, 1 slot PCMCIA Tipo II o III
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Planing to get:
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PCMIA Wireless Lan Card (compatible, yes/no)
USB Linksys 100TX lan card (compatible, yes/no, read on net, ppl have seem to have gotten it going...)
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I would like to have X-windows + Fluxbox, with Internet capabilities and OpenOffice...

THANKS FOR READING.....
any help is appreciated.

Most recent versions of any decent distro should work. Be warned though, some of the specs are a little low:

Scheda Video NeoMagic MagicGraph 128XD, 2 MB di memoria video condivisa - might have a few problems running X, even if it does have 160Mb RAM

Modem modem software Lucent v.90 56kbps - is it an 'internal' modem (built-in) or a PCMCIA one?

Obviously, if you wanted to make sure that everything worked just they way you wanted, then you should go for Slack, but be prepared to run in text mode for a bit .

hmm.. slackware? kinda too proish for me.

im still a linux newbie... well to answer the modem. its an internal modem. but i read somewhere on the net some dude with mdk 7.1 got it working.

ya 2mb is low i understand.. but thas y i want to run fluxbox.

but i got this laptop for $250 canadian off a friend of a friend + $60 for stick of 128mb ram.

not bad at all in terms of what i paid for...

any info on PCMIA wireless cards? compatibility?

Mandy will probably do the job quite nicely if you remember to pair it down enough to get the most out of a 333Mhz box. 8.0 runs fine on my Thinkpad.

The Lucent modem is bound to be a winmodem, but recently Lucent started producing drivers for nearly every laptop modem they've ever shipped... which go by names such as apollo and Mars and such, worry about it after installation.

Wireless pcmcia cards are well supported, but easily the ones best supported are produced by Lucent. Later Lucent spun this off into a company called orinoco. The silver or gold versions rock and only cost $20-$30 more than the prism2 chipset cards for which support is still beta and evolving. Yes, I know the prism2 linksys cards are available at every CompUSA on the bloody planet, but getting it to work is a hastle... I've got a pair of them and have helped 2x10^8 people here through installing them. Save the hastle... buy lucent.

USB under Linux stands for Unreliable Silly Bus. Its supported, but pcmcia makes life so simple! The 3Com 10/100 cards that retail for about $40-50 are great, as are in this case the Linksys 10/100 cards, and pretty much just about any pcmcia 10/100 nic you could find. Unlike windows which gets confused when you swap cards, Linux will hiccup once and go on.

Cheers,

Finegan

thx for the scoupe finegan...

ya i was planning to shoot for mdk 8.2

the reasion to y i want the USB thernet card is bc my laptop has only 1 pcmia card.. and i was planing to get a wireless card for that on my campus use. (dhcp)

usb ethernet at home. (static address)

so from what i read, u r saying get both PCMIA cards (wirelss & ethernet) ? have to seperate configurations and linux will be ok with that when i swop the cards?

Oh yes, quite easily... there about half a dozen ways, gui tools, command line, write your own scripts, built in so as to juggle configs. When I was first learning I had three cards I regularly used for my Thinkpad. Yeah, and USB is such a hastle, also from the few experiences I've had, ethernet over USB conversion does buggley things something that just aren't worth it.

Mandrake 8.2 is easily the most bloated distro currently on the market, but also one of the most user friendly, so just be careful on the install, go expert and remember that Mandrake's cute little utility to add whole chunks afterwards makes it easy to live by "when in doubt leave it out"

Cheers,

Finegan

ill give it a shot.