Hey all.

OK, I need a really light weight distro for a really old computer.

This is the hardware specs

Pentium MMX 166 MHz
64 MB of RAM

I want a distro that:

-Doesn't use KDE or Gnome (something like FVWM or XFCE might be nice, although I think even XFCE is too bloated for this comp)
-includes gcc (no, i dont expect to do any major compiling on this old computer, but if u read the kernel part ull see why i need it)
-has kernel headers available
-runs kernel 2.4 (I have an external SMC network card that supports Linux 2.4.x but the module needs to be compiled)

Is there a distro that includes all of that or else where I can easily download the packages from my main computer?

NOTE : if you know how to get the kernel headers and gcc installed on Puppy-mozilla 1.0.3 that would be even better!

Damn Small Linux has an install script.

OK, a couple more things. I loaded Knoppix 3.9 in text mode on the machine to work with some partitions, and just to see, i typed ifconfig. it appears rtl8150 (the kernel module that is used for SMC's USB to Ethernet Adapter) comes out of the box with kernel 2.6. So a minimalist distro with kernel 2.6 would be best. I am going to give Puppy a shot again, and try using modprobe rtl8150 to see if it supports my USB ethernet card, but I doubt it will out of the box because it uses kernel 2.4, and doesn't come with a compiler so i cant compile the kernel module

Lol, this is too much work

u can try crux, slackware (minimal install), Arch...etc...the bottom line just install whatever u want..

I have noticed that a lot of distros, however, feel very sluggish, even at the command line. for instance, suse 9.3 feels more sluggish at the command line than puppy feels with a gui. I was looking for more of a minimalist 2.6 distro. Most of the minimalist distros out there right now run on kernel 2.2 or kernel 2.4.

Slackware kind of scares me. Is it true you have to go through and upgrade each package by hand?

there are third party software for automatic download & upgrade namely swaret & slapt-get(i'm using slapt-get)..


crux using ports where u download the source from developer page & compile it... but crux is optimize for i686 ( so do Arch)....

Give Arch a shot, don't be scared by it's i686 requirement, the P-MMX scrapes in just nicely. A base install (recommended) just gives you your CLI and not a lot else, then you use pacman (package manager) to install what you want from there. Installation give you the option of both 2.4 and 2.6 kernels and should cover everything you need.