I have an old ibm aptiva 2176 in my room connected to my home network, it is currently running windows 98. On my new computer i have converted to redhat 9.

I was wondering if there was a good distro with a lightweight gui included like icewm or something similar that is good for web sufing and email.

Its got a p1 166 and 48 mb of ram

i have tried many distros in the past few weeks
such as redhat 7.3 (good but no light weight gui i installed ice but it had no programs in menus or ways to add them)

debian (i couldn't setup x i got a sis video card defualt driver didn't work but the vesa driver worked in redhat)

gentoo morphix knoppix demo linux libranet suse (none booted off cd or not enough ram eip and init errors??)

thanks in advance

Try Slackware.
For the icewm, you will have to manually configure the menu config file, or download a program to do it for you.

I think you'll find just what you're looking for over here:

http://www.vectorlinux.com/index.php?menu=1

It fits yer antique perfectly (I should know; I run a whole pile of antiques!) IceWM is the default GUI and it comes with a lot of apps already loaded up. The only problem I've encountered is getting the right X server for a laptop but I think I would have had that with most distros (if you have a problem, I'd reccomend running Knoppix and copying the settings from there; with a desktop tho I don't expect you will have problems)

To quote their site:
"VL 4.0 Hardware Requirements

The minimum hardware requirements to run VectorLinux 4.0 are a 166 MHz Pentium class processor with 32 MB of RAM memory, and just 700 MB of hard disc space (*).
...
(*) 635 MB of space for the installation plus 64 MB of swap space is the very minimum.
Extra space would be required for additional applications and / or your personal files."

If you'd like something leaner without the apps already loaded, you could always use their package manager to yank em off or you might just try Slackware. But it's Slack-based and if you've heard Slack is smooth on old hardware, Vector is smoother than butter on a bald monkey.

For Ice, I'd reccomend using IceWMCP (Control Panel). You'll need Python and Pygtk as well. Good stuff

Thanks for the advice I'll try vector i downloadin it now i'll let you know how it turns out thanks agian

vector linux didn't boot i tried to boot it from dos the kernel booted then i got this error
kernel panic tried to kill init

Better try VL3.0. I got that one working on a Toshiba Tecra 500cdt (120Mhz , 32 MB)
Laptops are a pain for any OS.
Btw.- Here's an overview of the VL-releases with their requirements and recommendations :ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dist...on_table2.html

ok thanks ill try that now if this doesn't work can anyone think of anything else

yes, vector is the only one i can think of now...

it's cool it works thanks man