Hi! I need help on finding a decent suitable linux distro for the following (1994) Intel spec PC:

Pentium 133 (Yes!)
B2437FX chipset
64Mb Ram
500Mb Drive (Yes!)
ATI-Rage Video Card
32x CDROM
serial mouse...

It has 519Mb 100% assigned to a single FAT16 partition with win98. I plan to wipe this out for:
80Mb Linux Swap, 20Mb Linux boot, 400Mb Free space for Linux.

With the above in mine what distro to download would you guys recommend?

This is a hobby effort and the aims of the box is learning:
i) work in text most most of the time
ii) some work in X (if possible) - not really necessary

In otherwords, what distro would meet the constraints and wouldn't be too difficult to install. I would consider myself a recent newbie. I have installed RedHat 8 and 9 before.

Finally, would the partition division be suitable above. ie would 80Mb be big enough swap for 64Mb? (I heard the x2 rule) and 20Mb for the boot (gulp! many I need to make that 50Mb?). That would leave me with around 400Mb for the distro proper.

Again, Thanks for any Advice.

Moved: More suitable for the Distribution forum

But with your specs and not running X, you should be able to load just about any distro on this machine with no problems. Try searching the forums here for many similiar threads.

Really! Excellent! I already have RH8 and RH9. Maybe I could just install the bare minimum to use runlevel 3. The processor P133 and 64Mb is what I need to watch for.

I'll have a look at older suggestions too.

Thanks!

Take a look at:
http://www.distrowatch.com/
http://www.elinux.com/articles/distros/index.jsp

If you don't plan on running a heavy GUI like kde or GNOME and don't need lots of httpd servers etc then you probably don't need much swap with 64MB.

If you are looking to learn from it you are as well to try different variations and see which you think offers the best performance.

Thanks for the links especially the 2nd one! I might try RH8 on the above spec and see where I get to... as I guess I can strip the packages down before the install...

Again Thanks!

If you're not a total beginner, and you're using this to learn more about how linux is set up, consider www.linuxfromscratch.org

The LFS project was started as a learning effort, and you'll be able to tailor the installation to fit your machine...

It will also take forever since you'll be recompiling the entire OS, and all of its apps. I'm getting ready to start a LFS system on a P166 machine, so I'll be right there with yah!

You don't need a boot partition. In this case that would be wasting space. You could look at Vector Linux, that should just about fit and give you a very complete and easy to install distro. Otherwise I would look at Debian or Slackware. Do a minimal install and add only what you need.

I'd also suggest you look for another harddisk. Some of the older hds can be picked up for a very low price second-hand. 2 GB should do to be a bit more comfy.

edit: LFS is out of the question, you don't have enough HD space now.

My Debian install with Fluxbox, a compiler, all of that is only 512MB. Since the machine won't and probably can't run X, you'll be fine. Slackware would obviously work well also.

I recommend Slackware.. I run slack 8.1 on a harddrive of the same size, in a 468 DX-2 running FVWM and it runs fine.