It's very old pentium I just recently discovered and now I have interest in throwing somekind of linux inside it as it's currently running norwegian Windows 95 that's collapsing all the time (surprise! ).

It should be rather easily configurable and have rather small kernel < 100 megs because it has only 400mbit harddrive.
Also similar system tree as Mandrake or Slackware has would be most wanted, because I dislike RedHats "standard" filetree.

Ease of install is not necessary.

why don't ya try vector linux or slackware?? fluxbox, blackbox, iceWM window manager should be fast enough (and lean).. jose

I don't need any X either, but I think new slack gets just too heavy for that thingy. It's hard to find old distros from net, ye know?

I was actually leaning towards Slack too, however.
Any stable old distro of Slack you could recommend? I've heard 3.x series were stable to their age. But are they young enough to handle i586?

Use new version. 3.x would work, but they're really old and it will be hard to install anything new (old gcc and so on).

Ive ran Slackware 9 on a 150Mhz Pentium. Just be descriminant on what packages you install, and go for a light WM. It runs as well as anything will on a 150Mhz PC.

Slackware has a low memory Kernel, make sure you choose that.

but the question is, how big kernel Slackware has. I've heard it's bigger than Mandrakes mainly because it's unoptimized.

netbsd is awesome for that type of thing.

use a vanilla kernel

i just booted my netbsd and my freebsd. they are old
versions, but the netbsd was using 6 megs of ram
after boot and the freebsd was using 5. anyway, thats
a lot lower than i can get with linux.

Debian or Slack.
Base install Debian and apt-get whatever else you want, from the net if you can connect.
Zipslack if you install to a DOS hard disk. (Easy install and good selection of software if you don't mind running from DOS).
I would think about 16MB RAM would mean sucess. Less, maybe not?
Good Luck.

If it's a machine sitting around waiting for something to do, and you don't already have a firewall/gateway, you can run Coyote Linux

Boots/runs off a floppy. You can remove the harddrive and CD-ROM and get a pretty quiet machine.

The current version is based on kernel 2.2, but a future release will be based on 2.4.

The script-based setup is easy and takes just a few minutes.

The website and other supporting websites can be difficult to navigate, however.

Somewhere in the documentation, it calls for a minimum of 12MB RAM. Don't believe it - no less than 16MB is necessary.

Hello, Eits0.
Depending on the exact specifications of the PC in question, you may be able to install ZipSlack directly into the Windows partition.

You could also start with BasicLinux and add Slack packages.

Btw Enlightenment using the Axios theme uses 30megs ram as reported by GKrellm, while Fluxbox is reported at 70+megs, with the same other processes running. And right now E 0.16.5 is superior to Flux 0.1.14 or 0.9.3, so I really suggest testing this out.