I have an old, windows 95-era PC (Pentium Processor at 100 Mhz, 16 megs ram). Its just taking up space in my basement, and I'd like to put Linux on it and learn how it works.

I'm wondering which distribution would be the best and where I can get it. I'm also wondering if there are any books that anyone would suggest for a total newbie. I've only worked with windows, and to a lesser extent, the Mac OS.

Any help would be great.

Mike

i would say you should use one of the following distributions:

grey cat linux: http://home.wanadoo.nl/peterdekoning/main.htm

damn small linux : http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

slackware but only an older version slack 7 or so www.slackware.com

...and ??? size hard drive?
Deli Linux may be what you want if you have the disk space. Do not expect Linux at it's flashiest. Sounds useful though.
The test computer is a 486 laptop with 16 MB RAM, and all apps which comes with DeLi Linux are running smoothly.

Slackware or Debian in console/text only would run fine. Read up on the installation and/or install it a few times until you get it right.

hard drive is 1080 megs. I've been recommended DeLi Linux once before, and I was going to ask for anyone's opinion on it.

How would any of the distros that all you have recommended work on a 75mhz pentium, 800 mb hdd and 8 mb of ram. Like would it work well or should I just forget about linux on that system?

For DeLi Linux:
System requirements
-------------------
386 processor (486 recommended)
8 MB RAM (16 MB recommended for running with X)
80 MB hard disk (300 MB recommended for full installation)

For Grey Cat 3.x:

minimal:

CPU: 386
RAM: 4 meg
HD: 65 meg free (only foppy install possible)
VGA

recommended:

CPU 486
RAM 8 or 16 meg
HD 80 meg free (hard disk and floppy install possible)
SVGA

Damn Small wouldn't run under that amount of ram.

I'm sure you'll be able to use Linux on that comp Dragoon, just not not nessasarily with X. But there is plenty you can do with just the console. Web surfing, email, instant messaging, playing music, even full-blown word-processing with Tex. That's pretty much all I use my computer for.

yea console based linux rocks sometimes

Your link is about a computer with twice as much ram as Dragoon's.

I went ahead and installed gcl (don't have enough knowledge yet for deli, plus my dad also uses it so I found the fact that gcl is inside of windows better for him) and it came out nicely, though I only had like 30 min. with it. Even X ran pretty nice and I'm hoping to work with it when I have time this weekend, though I would really like to know how to shutdown from the commandline ^^;. I tried shutdown now and it just goes to runlevel 1. Now I've never had to use the commandline to shut down so I don't know whats going on, help?

shutdown -h now /for system halt
shutdown -r now /reboot
or do you mean that you cant use shutdown as normal user?

I'm thinking of shutdown to completly be able to turn off the power to the system O.o.....

try this:

su
*password*
modprobe apm
poweroff

modprobe will load the APM module if it isn't loaded, and if you have it built, if you have it already loaded, then you can skip that command. Even if you issue the command, it won't break anything. If you don't have it built, I would get it built, it's pretty nice.

The poweroff command can only be issued by root, unless you tweak your system. It basically does 'shutdown -h now'.