Hi.

I'm looking for an OS that will run on an old Compaq Presario 2262 PC that I've picked up. I'd really like something small, but feature packed and simple to set up and operate. (So basically, what everyone wants from their OS!)

My setup is as follows (don't laugh...)

233 MHz CPU (300 MMX)
256 MB RAM (upgraded to it's max from 32MB)
2.1 GB HDD
4 MB Shared video Memory


I'm guessing that anything that'll run on it won't be exactly cutting edge, but I'm sure that there must be something better than Windows 98, that won't cost me a penny... (Let's face it, it's hardly a machine I want to spend any money on.)

All suggestions gratefully received.

with that small a hd, i'd recommend damn small linux. or maybe an older version of ubuntu. if you had atleast a 5 gig drive, i'd say nearly any distro will suffice for learning atleast. there are others such as feather linux, puppy linux, and peanut linux but i'm not sure how simple they are. google them and read up on them, all sights will say the requirements. good luck and have fun with it.

Thanks for advice. I'm gonna trawl around for some more info...

How old a version? v2.0? v3.0? Anyone know where I can download older distros??

Thanks again

you can get slackware 10.2 to install @ around 800 meg using the XFCE desktop.

I have a pc with only 2 gig HD also, on that pc I used "zipslack" install's at 100 meg, then added in xorg, mozilla firefox, thunderbird, xpdf and xmms and a few reequired libraries that was 300 meg. adding in abiword threw in about 200 meg after all the requirements. I also put in fluxbox as the window manager. All in all, I have a functioning pc sitting around 600 meg.

Hard drives are CHEAP nowadays... install a bigger one. You'll have many more options that way.

Luck!

Maybe check out XavierP's UltraMegaSuper "Which Distro" Thread. I'd be surprised if you didn't join it soon anyway.

I'd say DSL or maybe LFS could be squeezed onto a 2GB drive. But you could probably find a larger drive in someone's "broken" Windows machine too! That's where I get all of my extra hardware.

You can use Arch Linux. You have decent RAM (same like mine), however, I have 1.2 ghz Sempron cpu. I have KDE (kdebase), K3B, KOffice, KMplayer, Gaim, Opera, ImageMagick, etc-- and this is the space it occupies:

Arch Linux is i686 optimized. It runs fast and smooth on my system. If KDE is too much (try it first) for your system, XFCE4 should run fine.

Good luck.

feather Linux
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/

Vector Linux
http://www.vectorlinux.com/

DSL
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Puppy Linux
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=3

Slackware
http://www.slackware.com/

BeatrIX
http://www.watsky.net/

you can find more here

http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributi...Distributions/

Jake