Hey guys.

I have an old PC I recently got from a friend who was going to trash it [This happens to me often - I've got an Apple ][e in my garage!] and it's an odd ball to say the least, so bear with me.

It shows up with windows98 [not sure if it's SE or FE, but partitions are FAT32] as a Pentium 2 266MHz, with 128MB of SDRAM, possibly PC66 or PC100. Now the odd thing is, unlike every PC100-era computer that I've seen, it has 4 DIMM slots. Is that normal? I've only seen that lately with DDR2 RAM.

I'd like something light to install on it, just to act like a simple web-surfing PC. Nothing powerfull. Just made to view the occasional website while the better PCs are off/used, and maybe a bit of word processing with something light.

I've got a 4GB HDD, but for various reasons I can't let go of Windows98. It's got about 700MB free, and I could shed off an extra 200MB.

I was looking at Xubuntu, but it looks too bloated. DSL looks alright, but the GUI doesn't seem to have a taskbar of sorts, which is a no-no for me; my sister will be most likely using this too, and she'll be puzzled by it. I was considering installing it with IceWM, or with Xfce.

What do you guys think I should install?

u can try out SLAX or BeaFanatIX.

Maybe a minimal Slackware install with fluxbox?

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

Vector Linux 4.3
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/

SLAX Live CD
http://www.slax.org/

BeatrIX
http://www.watsky.net/

ELIVE
http://www.elivecd.org/


you can find more here:
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributi...Distributions/
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/

Thanks guys for the links. I'll try out Damn Small, but does it have a taskbar? I remember reading something about its windows manager [Was it fluxbox?] not having a real taskbar.

I could just put Xfce or IceWM on it instead of the default one.

You are right that fluxbox doesn't have a real taskbar, no start menu either. Everything is accessed through left? clicking the desktop. Now, I can't remember right or left click. Anyway, if you minimize the window it does go to a bottom dock for later retrieval. Also, fulx doesn't support icons on the desktop without a lot of tweaking.

Flux is a very light desktop that doesn't need a lot of resources. Should run pretty well with you specs.

Out of curiosity, why is no taskbar a deal breaker?

I'm too used to having one.

If the minimized programs just go down to the dock, that should be fine.

You could always try Zenwalk. I'm seriously plugging Zenwalk as of late; it's the first distro that I've played with that, upon installation on my laptop, "just worked," with minimal tweaking. It comes with XFCE (confugured with the taskbar at the top and a panel at the bottom, though I'm sure we could fix that) and ONE application solution per type, meaning that it doesn't have 350 different word processor apps. I've only installed it twice, but I believe you can shave it way down. It's stable, fast, and modern. I think you're below the minimum but I've found that that's not usually an issue.

Unfortunately, with Zenwalk I've got everything but the diskspace.

Of course, I could always find a 160GB HDD from a local source, and hook it up, leaving 100GB or so for shared space on the network. They're like 70$ now, and I can reuse it later.

Other than disk space, I hit the minimums, but is that just to get the OS up and running? Would I be able to fit anything else? I'm willing to up the RAM aswell [though it's expensive for PC100/133] but I just can't do away with the CPU.

Could I stick the OS on another computer, though instead? Or would that just make it way too slow?

Thanks guys [and possibly girls] for your suggestions.