I am looking to develop some C code for a set of obsolete Pentium1 motherboards for cost reasons. Which distributions would be suitable for a Pentium 1 running at 166-200MHz with 32 to 64MB? I don't need X, Internet access or any services except sound card output, possibly Telnet, I do need a frame buffer to write a menu to and networking (these motherboards will be networked and will hopefully boot from the network without a hard disk). I would like to develop on the target hardware and then remove X and GCC and reduce the RAM used. I have thought of Red Hat 6.2 or 7.1 but need to know what the options are.

Thank you

Using a current distro on older hardware works very well.

Presently, on a 486-66 with 16M of RAM, I have Slackware 10 (2.4.26) working as my NAT router/firewall/ISP dialer.
This box was loaded and the kernel compiled to be as lean and simple as I can get it.

I mention this as some proof that you do not need to use an old distro.

As guzzi said, You dont really need an older distro just a minimal install of like Slackware, I had Slack 9.1 running on a 350 mghz amd with 192 megs of ram and had X running (fluxbox) with no problems. You could also go with something like Damn Small Linux, Peanut linux, or some other small distro, see my sig and click on the distro link.

i agree, slackware or maybe debian. if you've got a little time to put into it gentoo might be a good choice as well.