OK - it's a Compaq Presario 2292, AMD K6 333MHz, 316Mb RAM, 2 disks - 1 40Gb, 1 4Gb, with Liteon CD-RW

I did install SuSE 9.0, but have found it glacially slow - KDE (3.1) in particular.
Tried to upgrade KDE to 3.3, but 'make install' ultimately hit an "internal compiler error" which has left me disinclined to pursue this any further.

So now I've decided I might as well start again from scratch, with a more appropriate new distro.

Any recommendations?

I have an HP Pavilion, 433mhz, 192 ram, 5400rpm hardrives, runing Suse9.1 personal and Slackware10. They both run fine using kde. You could try a smaller wm on your Suse, or try out Slackware.

Try slackware. I love Slackware.

i'm using debian sid in a k6-2 with 192mb ram and its running really fast
I been using slackware before and I also worked well but for some reason debian goes faster
stay away from suse, mdk and fedora, there really heavy on system resources. som will recommend gentoo but it takes an eternity to compile everything, specially on old machines

my friend uses slackware 9 on his pentium 133mhz.

I'm running Mandrake10.0 just fine and fast with my PII.350/192MB.

Yves.

Slackware rules!!! Got for it.

thanks for the responses

Since last posting - found the KDE3.3 "make install" was restartable and the install proceedd past the previous point of error. On it churned literally for days - then when it seemed on the verge of completing successfully, fell over with a real fatal error.

Hacked off with that, junked the entire SuSE 9.0 install and (since the CDs were to hand from a recent Linux mag) gave Mandrake 10.1 a whirl. Looks nice - but KDE 3.2 just as slow alas.

Time to check out Slackware methinks - with a peek at VectorLinux too maybe.....

...Masturbation! errr... yah, I mean, Slackware RULES! Here-Here!

u r sick. lol
just jokin

I try...

hehe... had to correct a spelling mistake in that last post now that I looked back on it.

Vector is really nice, especially in its low-end configuration. I mean, yes it is possible to install KDE or Dropline Gnome, but by then it is as bloated as the next distro... but the default is excellent, with the choice of IceWM, Fluxbox or XFce4 for windows managers. While Slackware could surely be configured the same way, Vector is ready out of the box with nice fonts, themes and GTK2 support. I was especially happy to find its default mail program was Sylpheed-Claws which has good support for IMAP unlike standard Sylpheed... It also comes with Java and Flash installed out of the box. There is emelfm2 and Rox for file management. The only curious choice is Mozilla rather than Firefox. But overall, with Vector you get great, lightweight yet suprisingly useable environment without having to mess around too much. Recommended!

Vote for slackware 10.0. lol

Well I went for Slackware 10.0 in the end. Took a couple of goes to get it right, but got there eventually

Still finding my way around - buit my impression is that, while performance is a bit snappier than SuSE or Mandrake, it's still on the slow side. KDE 3.2 is nice, but some of the apps can take ages to kick off.
Don't think I can do anything about it - "top" shows the CPU fully engaged - 0.0% idle.

I'm fully UNIX-literate, but wrt Linux I'm something of a relative errrrr...ahem...., so I'm a bit confused by this. In the PC's previous incarnation as a Win98 box, there seemed no be no performance issue when starting up GUI apps. Is KDE really that resource-hungry?