Looking for small distribution
 

Hi. I'm not sure if I'm posting on the right forum but this doesn't fit in distr. forum since I'm not sure what distr I'm looking for.
I have old 486 laptop (8mb memory, 200mb hdd) with only floppy drive and now I would like to install linux on it so that my sister can use it for writing and small office work. I don't have NIC on it so I should install it from floppy. The problem is that since my sister doesn't know nothing about linux she needs graphical window manager. Win95 is already too heavy enviroment and well.. it's old windows, it's not stable. Any suggestions? :)

ok. so, the answer is: any linux will work, just don't install everything under the sun. Check out DSL (damn small linux) and there are others, vector (based on slackware) is supposedly good on decrepit machienes and newbie freindly. google small linux and you will get tonnes of choice.

Have you been to http://freshmeat.net and searched for windowmanager? and desktop enviroment?

is icewm (looks like 95 and is light) still too heavy?

titanium_geek

I'm not even sure how well Damn Small Linux runs on 8 MB of RAM--that's not very much at all. You can give it a shot, though.

According to Damn Small's web page, it can run on as little as a 486DX with 16megs of RAM. That's with an actual GUI environment, so I'd guess that with 8megs it might be possible in text mode.

Yeah, maybe instead of having a desktop environment (I think DSL uses Fluxbox), you could just have it boot to terminal mode and have her type in the names of applications to launch them. I think you still need X for that.

Small Linux, old version of Vector, Basic Linux, maybe Puppy.