Puppy 4.12 Iso

Puppy 4.12 md5sum

When booting up as Live CD. Use Gparted in Puppy to make a 256MB swap partition (minimum)512 MB would be better (you have the room at 10 gig).

Wireless Drivers (if you need em)

Edit: If problems with the "can't find .sfs" after installing. You might have to go with the retro version of 4.12. I got above download links from
http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/puppylinux/

If 4.12 gives you no joy. Then try 3.01 download.

Good luck.
In my case, Antix recognized my wifi card (an old Cisco PCMCIA card) without the need to look for additional drivers. I hope this works out for you. I found that testing 2 or 3 different distros as LiveCDs was a good approach to selecting which one to subsequently install.

gonna try puppy first, 512? doesnt matter if its bigger right? the HD has debris on it right now, i think ill probably just format the drive and give it the full run of the main partition. debris works, but its painfully slow. probably because of my disgusting lack of RAM

Check out these two that follow. Kwort is a new one that looks promising.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=kwort

http://sourceforge.net/projects/systemrescuecd/files/

Looks like you will want both.

Found some used PC100 laptop RAM. Very cheap. Upgraded the memory to 512 MB. Now works even better!

I made a test on an old PIII with 256 MB Ram, and 20 GB HD...
The lightweight distros worked... but...
Puppy crashed once in a while... still recognized the hardware outstandingly good.
Xubuntu as well as ZevenOS did it too, but where too heavy and did not have all the Hardware drivers.

To my surprise, the best working distro, was Debian 5.05. It still had HW problems, however with some work configuring the Graphics (Xorg) as well as Network cards, it worked fast enough for most office tasks.
Just don't expect speed with the java apps from facebook and some other sites, or don't try to watch videos on it. Except for that, you can play quite well with old Hardware and Debian!

Looking for performance on old machines... Try Debian first!

Just a quick follow-up after a few months of use.
AntiX worked very well on this machine, except for a few minor difficulties related to shut-down of the computer, which was erratic.
Also, as updates were installed gradually over the following months, a few additional bugs appeared, such as sound problems and the power icon dissappearing, and finally, a problem with halevt update and recognition of USB keys.
Nothing major, but still annoying.

I ended up deciding to switch over to Xubuntu 10.10.
It recognized all of my hardware very well, installed very smoothly and has been working like a charm for the past two days.
Seems about as fast as AntiX at the present time (in terms of boot up time and responsiveness of the main applications).
Anybody else has tried Xubuntu on such a low-end machine?

I tried lubuntu on a very basic system and I think it worked better than xubuntu.

Did you ever try slitaz?

Yup, I tried Slitaz, but it did not recognize directly my wireless card.

Thanks for the update.