im looking for what will run fastest on this:


imac g3 "ruby"
450mhz powerpc 32bit
320mb ram (allot for this system im told)
80GB western digital HDD (upgraded it myself)
cd/dvd rom slot loading drive



i prefer net installs over 700mb cds

ok so is it

a. debian
b. gentoo
c. yellow dog
d. other


thanks.

What exactly do you want to do with this machine? "Fast" is a rather relative concept, that depends on many criteria, most importantly what it is you want to be doing.

YDL doesn't even support anything below G4 officially anymore, so don't expect much from it. Between Debian and Gentoo, Gentoo is going to give you a more optimized system. But, if that is going to give you a faster system is not so cut and dry. The real-world performance difference between Gentoo and Debian on such (relatively speaking) simplistic hardware is likely to be marginal to zero. You don't really start seeing much benefit from CPU-specific optimizations until you get into the more modern CPUs.

well how the hell do i install gentoo it wants me to download tarballs and install the entire system piece by piece...


but debian the installer keeps freezing....

With Gentoo, you really need to read the installation handbook. Gentoo is an advanced Linux distribution, and it's installation is anything from a simple point and click affair.

It sounds like you probably want to be using the stage 3 installation, which forgoes most of the building of the base system in favor for a pre-compiled version. There are multiple schools of thought on this, but most people feel that a stage 3 Gentoo install isn't a whole lot different from Debian, Slackware, or any other (relatively) minimalistic distribution in terms of performance. The best optimization (and theoretically performance gains) come from the stage 1 and 2 installs, but they are considerably more difficult (and time consuming, on a slower machine).