I just got an old laptop, and have been looking around for a distro to put on it.

Much to my surprise (and bewilderment) I can't seem to find minimum hardware requirements listings for most of the common distros. Last time I went distro "tasting", about 2 years ago, all of the big distros listed minimum hardware requirements in their docs.

So, first of all, I thought it would be really good if we could start compiling an article here listing the minimum requirements for our favorite distros.

Now, on to my problem. I got this laptop (free, of course). It's an ancient Gateway 2000 Solo. It has a Pentium MMX 166 MHz, 32 Mb RAM, and a HDD large enough to run Windows 95.

All I want to use it for is a text-only box to connect to serial consoles on switches, routers, etc.

If possible, I'd really like something that uses RPM for package management.

Any suggestions?

So, to get this started,

openSuSE 10.3
Processor: Intel—Pentium 1-4 or Xeon; AMD—Duron, Athlon, Athlon XP, Athlon MP, Athlon 64, Sempron or Opteron
Main memory: at least 256 MB; 512 MB recommended
Hard disk: at least 500 MB for minimal system; 3 GB recommended for standard system
http://www.novell.com/products/opensuse/sysreqs.html

More of an FYI since this distro doesn't use the Pkg Mger you wanted, but I have DSL running very well on a Desktop with your same hardware. Been up and running about 6 months. I use it to test perl scripts.