Hello, i am somewhat new to linuix and i am trying to get a wide impression from the various linux distro's. I have fallen in love with Fedora core 3 and i am currently learning about redhat 9 and linspire. i was wondering what is a good distro for a much older computer. one running on a 200 mhz P5 processer,limited ram and a max HDD of 3.2 gb. i would like a GUI but only if it will load fast on this computer with its limited resources, otherwise i will settle with a text base distro. What are your suggestions???

FC3 is sluggish and not near as fast as FC1 for me, and that's on a P4 with 512 RAM.

I say go with a distro that is optimized for i586, such as Mandrake or SuSE, even as much as I like Fedora Core. I find the biggest bottleneck will be your RAM and video card for gui operations. For any type of server use: RAM, RAM, RAM. That and fast drives for any sort of database access.

Serving up simple html pages you can use that system without issue. Even light php work will go quickly enough (for moderate traffic that is).

If you're willing to go with text based, FC3 would do well for getting into a RH based system. Debian also rocks as it's awesome for package management. Try them both. I'd personally suggest going to www.linuxiso.org and grabbing about every distro you can find and try them out.

Bottomline: As the subsequent posts will tell you, try each distro until you find one that "fits". Experience is the best answer and with a choice like your desktop distro, only your own experience will be able to answer that one for you.

"...P5 ..."
didnt know those were out yet, and i thought theyd be faster than 200mgz :P
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go to distrowatch.com and do a search for the knid of distro youre looking for (i.e. server,, general desktop, multimedia- i doubt this on an older machine,but... and so on).
just finding one that 'fits', as deoren says, is what you gotta do. with some many choices, a little trail-and-error is required.


btw- maybe more appropriate in the 'distros' section...?

Try Vector Linux. I ran it on 200Mhz, 64MB RAM 1.5GB Hard Drive, 4MB video card. I ran IceWM at a good speed (I didn't notice any slow down). It also includes XFCE and Fluxbox.