Well, to be fair, I dont subject my old pc (Mat) to the stresses and strains of internet browsing, however, I would like to give him a little more to do than sit around in the loft entertaining the spiders. On my far flung internet travels, I have come across many articles stating that Linux is perfect for the older pc (understandably, he's currently having a little trouble keeping windows 98 going, poor thing), although I thought I should ask a group of people who have a little experience in the field before rushing into things.

Mat, for those interested, has an IntelDX2™ (66MHz) processor, a 405MB hardrive ( of which just 34.6MB are free under Win9, a floppy drive, CD drive, and - about a year ago - he developed a friendly error message telling me "there is a problem with your display setting, or the current settings do not work with your hardware".

So, should I get a linux distro, if so which one would you recommend and is it suitible for a Linux newbie such as mself?

First, what would you like to do with it? There are plenty of distro's that should be able to turn your machine into a firewall/router. Take a look at smoothwall, IPcop, coyote linux, etc.

Now if you want to turn it into an actual desktop machine, I would recommend Damn Small Linux or Debian Pure. Damn Small is based off of Debian, and I believe is only 50MB total. Or for Debian, you should be able to do a minimal netinstall of Debian (which will leave you with a working command prompt) and then add x and a lightweight window manager.

Thanks! While I take the tests...

I'm afraid that I neglected to mention that Mat has no internet capabilities, so I intend to use him for wordprocessing etc. Also, I think that I'll probably need a distro capable of being installed from floppy, although he may (just may...) boot up from a live cd (I've never tryed this though)

I would try Damn Small which installs from a live CD. Otherwise, you may be able to use a floppy to boot a minimal system and then install from the CD. I'm pretty sure you can do this with Debian.

http://www.debian.org/releases/3.1/i386/

Ok, I've been told by zegan studios Suse, and by eekdoc a whole load (of which Beatrix looks promising), although your suggestion of Debian actually looks the best, seeing as I only have the 12Mb RAM.

P.S. All I can find in debian is this about booting from floppy. (So far... I will keep looking)

P.P.S. Sorry, that's exactly what you said!

Actually, Debian may not work on only 12MB. I think the installer requires 20MB minimum to install, but you can give it a shot. I'd recommend trying Damn Small or Beatrix if it's also a minimalist distro (never really looked into it). Suse will be way too bloated for you.

It looks like you may struggle finding a new distro with enough ram to run a gui. But I would check out this link:

http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributi...Distributions/

And check to see if any of these even work for you. Damn Small's homepage says it needs 16MB to run...

So does windows 98, and Mat runs ok with that - although an OS that ran under 12 would be a major improvement! Also, I do only have the 405MB HD.

AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Ok I've been to loads of sites, and the only distros I can find that run in 12mb are those who run straight from a floppy.

Does anyone know of a distro that actually runs in under 12 (or near enough)?

These small distros you are looking at are quick downloads. Testing them out will only cost a few cd's and a bit of time. If they can't run it's a learning experience.
Check them for 'lowmem' installs or what damnsmalllinux calls a 'frugal install'. I think the big obstacle will be running a GUI. Text mode should be possible.
Another possibility would be finding a release that matches mat's vintage, though I can't tell you if anyone is offering these for download.
Edit: Forgot to add linux uses ram differenly than ms products. Running a GUI in an old version of windows does not necessarily mean that same machine can do it in linux.

Oooooooo I see. I think I'll wait untill I get some CD-RWs before I start burning cds (I've got only 1 CD-R left lol). When I do get them, though, I'll try DSL's live cd and preogress from there.

Thanks All, I'll keep you posted - and curse you if mat doesn't survive the transition from Win to Lin, lol!

One thing that hasn't been mentioned in this thread, make sure you have a way to reinstall windows if all else fails. I'm convinced some form of linux can run on this thing but you may not be happy with the result.

Hmmmmmmm... I don't have the win98 install disk anymore - however, Mat is destined for the dustbin if I don't find something to do with him...