Well, I recently salvaged my nana's old comp which is running a PII @ 225 Mhz, 350 Mbs of Ram, and 8 GB HD. Personally I love older computers and even though they may be slow, they're still good for various purposes. I'm turning this one into a ventrilo and small ftp server (maybe). Anyways, I'm looking for a good linux distro that will be lite on use of resources and possibly have some server stuff come pre-packaged like samba. I'd like to have a small GUI to work with like Enlightenment or ICEWM too. Anyone have any recommendations?

Lion-o

Slackware. Comes with everything that you need for a server. Due to your limited diskspace, just pay attention to what you install (i.e leave KDE out).

Question @ Rickh:

I know slackware is definately good for learning linux but is BeaFanatIX good for this too? I looked at the website and it seems pretty good but I'm guessing you have first hand experience. What is your opinion? In the future, i'll probably get rid of the gui all together but I've been using Windoze most of my life and about 6 months ago switched to SuSE. I like the shell but I need to get better with it and thats part of the reason I'm setting up the server.

The strength of Beafanatix is that it's very easy for a newbie to set up and get working, and it is designed with a very light footprint. First time Linux installs are generally very difficult. There is an incredibly steep initial learning curve. Once you get a feel for how Linux works, and get comfortable with the command line (Terminal in an Xwindows GUI), you will be ready to experiment with the more traditional distros, and you'll have a feeling for what should and should not work. I would not recommend that any newbie start with Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, etc., but I think those distros should be the goal as they learn how Linux works.

You can set up a server on any distro, and bash script tutorials are all over the web. OTOH, if you have 6 months experience with Linux already, you may be ready for one of the more difficult distros.

you might also take a look at mepis lite, it works quite well on older systems

hi lion-o
iam also a newbie and also started with sus3 9.3. and also facing some trouble with file server.. guess u can help me out by keeping me advised about ur progress..
chhatrashal@gmail.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/

BeaFanatIX
http://bea.cabarel.com/

Elive:
http://www.elivecd.org/

Deli
http://delili.lens.hl-users.com/

How about ZenWalk? I'm a relative newby, but it seems like a good small distro.

Slackware and Gentoo are about the lightest I've seen. You install the base system and then only what you want.

For a really light and really intense learning experience you can try installing Linux from nothing... http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

i would recomend XFCE as a window manager, it uses very little overhead and is quite easy to use for those with a windows background more so than blackbox/fluxbox IMO

my personal impression of "blackbox/fluxbox" thing is that the impact of "recoilings" by using them are actually harmless and soothing , and they help to keep people away from using windows more often ... in the sense that as if we are asking ourselves "between kde , gnome , xfce and windows , which one is better ??" ...


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