Hi,
I need to install one of the Mandriva flavors on my daughter's Pentium 200 w/ 256MB ram.
I'm confused by all the selections on:
iso.linuxquestions.org/distro.php?distro=3

Could someone please make a suggestion?

Also, can I expect Mandriva to run pretty well on this processor?
She will be mainly surfing (Firefox), chatting Gaim?), and typing documents (OpenOffice.org)

TIA,
Charles

I think that it'll run decently with that big amount of ram you have. Maybe don't run KDE or Gnome but use xfce or icewm to make it faster.

And maybe you'd want abiword to type documents instead of OOo .

Thanks for the reply. Good information to know.

I'm currently downloading Mandriva-Linux-Free-2006-CD1.i586.iso.
Is that the set that I want?

I would honestly try the mandrake 9.0, 9.1 or 9.2 on that system yes you do have enough memory although your processor is just a little to slow. I remember a few years ago I installed 10.0 on a machine with similar specs it ran but was slow as molasses for simple programs like kwrite or audio software like xmms. Kde will use most if not all of your memory either way so you may want to use as much swap as you can salvage.And if it's for your daughter I would definetly set her up with kde.

Slow is right! It takes forever to boot and load the gui.
I have a P III 600 w/ 256MB running FreeBSD that I'm considering swapping with her.
Should be able to run just about any distro on it.

Does it really matter what distro you put on the computer. Aren't you the one who will do the administration anyway? If so, why not putting FreeBSD or Arch linux on it. I bet that would run faster then mandriva.
I think XFCE or icewm should be good for your daughter, I don't think KDE is necessary. There are gui configuration programs for xfce and icewm too.

My mother and little brother use icewm (on a p1 166mhz, 64mb ram) just fine for example. They write documents with abiword, surf with firefox (or opera), check mail with sylpheed-claws, msn with tmsnc (console) . It's dead simple (otherwhise they couldn't use it).
You can make very nice simple menus in icewm using the menumaker program.

It will run quite fast on that p2. I don't see that much difference between my xp1700+ and my p1, because I use lightweight applications. And it's still pretty if you use the SilverXP theme with icewm. And don't forget to change in /etc/X11/icewm/preferences: MenuMouseTracking=1

As file manager you could use emelfm or xfe.

Music xmms (uses only between 5 to 10 percent cpu on my p1)

video mplayer

pdf: xpdf

games: frozen bubble, lbreakout, supertux, ....

etc etc