Ok, i recently bought a 'Wizard' PC...

its a Cryix 233 (P2 equal) with 32mb RAM (Will be upgrading to 256mb hopefully) and a 5Gb hard drive...

it has Red Hat 6.2 pre-loaded on there...which is a limited version...

i was originally going to put Peanut on there, but now im wondering if i should keep Red Hat on there...

im prolly just going to use it to leach things and large/alot of transfer files, so i need it to be able to be networked with WinXP and possibly WinME (my laptop )

and i also want to use something like VNC on it....is VNC and WinVNC compatable with each other? can i use WinVNC to 'log' into VNC on my Linux Distro (whatever it is)

will that version of Red Hat be Enough?? is it easy to upgrade???

how would it handle having Linux installed on another computer, and then transfered back into the 'wizard'??? (ie put the hard drive into a computer to install Linux...)

I would use slackware on a box like that. Your right a little more ram would help you out. Slack is very good on older hardware. I run it on a 450 mhz with 384 mbs ram and it runs great, even in kde. As far as vnc never used it just thought I would throw cudos at slack. LOL

Good luck!

whoa, thanks for the quick reply...

i never really used Linux before (prolly should've said it in my original post) so i'll need something thats relativly easy to use...

The main reason i was gonna use Peanut, is cause i know someone that is into linux a little, and he told me about it...so it was more familiar then the others...and i did a search at linuxiso.org (i think thats the place) for a 'minimalist' distro (as it only has a 5Gb drive....i will prolly buy a bigger one!)

i'll have a look at Slack...

BTW how does that react when the hard drive is moved between computers???
and can that be networked with WinXP Machines??...i should prolly post these in the slack fourms...

Anyone else???

Contrary to what people will tell you slack is not hard to install at all. As far as moving it between machines I really dont know I am poor and have one machine lol. Now you can use something like samba to network the machine with windows and there are a ton of apps for slack. I have it installed on a 10 gig drive and have pretty much the works installed and its only taking a gig and a half. I just love slack has always worked when others would not. Another one to look at is vector linux its a spin off of slack but build for older hardware. But slack does the older hardware thing fine to.

Hope I was a help!

Something else, but WAAAAYYYY (ok, maybe not with the extra a and y) rough for a newbie, but will give you a warm fuzzie if you get it done:

Boot the box with the 5 gig using Slack as your distro. Use that as your root partition and then, after init completes, remote mount via nfs another drive on another machine where storage is not so cumbersome. Mount it up under somewhere easy to remember like /mnt/storage and then share that directory via SAMBA to your network. No removing the drive and replacing it is as easy as pointing to a different private IP, mounting it up at the same mount point, and BAM! New storage space.

Cool