I have an old Intel Pentium 50MHz PC and i was wonder what distro would run smoothly on it, just an old simple one, i dont even think ill need graphic, desktop. just for me to expiement with linux more.

RAM would be important :) ... even though
there are howtos for linux with 4MB :D

I'd give Zipslack (or Slack) a shot. Or any
of the mini-/recovery distros out there that
will run of tiny media...

Cheers
Tink

Hmmm, Slackware could be used quite well on there.

I second the notion for Slackware

Although it has it's own problems, I second (or third?) Zipslack.
It's gonna be a good place to start if system memory is low 8-16MB, hard disk size is small 100-200MB.

ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/...ions/slackware

old slack versions here.

Any distro can be used just install the basic core system without the gui,

what linux opewrating systems can you run on a 166Mhz system

sorry its a 66Mhz. mangrake would not run on it i am sure, will there ever be shockwave for linux

sign the petition for shockwave on *nix:
http://www.petitiononline.com/linuxswp/petition.html

One of the best kept secrets, as far as I can tell, in linux is Mandrake 7.02 Air for i486. Last time I looked, it is still available on www.cheapbytes.com for a few bucks. I have been totally unable to find it in any download mirror. And, do not confuse this with Drake 7.2 for i586.

I bought it several years ago, and put it on a Dell (I think it was) 486, 50MHZ, with around 40 MB Ram. And, it fit in a 540MB HD.

Note this included a working version of KDE. It was slow, of course, but not as slow as molasses. I am not the greatest expert but do not think it would be worse on a small Pentium, especially if you have more RAM and a bigger HD.

I had hoped to connect to internet with an external modem, but the reason I could not was not the computer's problem, but because attglobal.net has a screwy log on sequence, and I could not find what it was. Much later, I figured it out on a 266MHZ laptop with Drake 8.0.

I am trying to build a 486 in Mexico City for a poor country family, and I hope to put AIR including GIMP on it. My remaining problem is, the 486 does not have an SVGA board, so it is taking time to work through the various problems. After I loaned it to my nephew to use in his government office, it didn't work, and I had to take a HD driver board to fix it.

Then, I pre-loaded a 2GB HD with AIR in Texas on my old 486, but it didn't work in Mexico due to the VGA card, sigh.

Clearly, if it will run KDE slowly on such a minimal machine, it should run level 3 fine.

My one gripe was it has Klyx, not lyx, which is my preference. Note this is powerful stuff, we are not talking a bare bones installation. Drake did a great job shrinking this.

Re: Linux on a 166Mhz Pentium

Over this last week I installed Mandrake 9.2 on our ancient toshiba 166Mhz pentium. It has 48 megs ram.

I have it almost all set up as a LAMP server right now (Linux Apache Mysql Php). Now this doesn't do any graphics, but it handles this like a pro, very fast considering, servers up web pages for sure. (Wouldn't stand up to a slashdotting, but a personal page, no problem).

Anyway, to finish my rambling, I'm sure that if I installed X it would run one of the lightweight window managers no problem - Give mandrake a chance.

-Chris