HI. I was at a hamfest in Manassas yesterday and bought this little netbook. It has Windows CE 5.0 and is painfully slow. I would like to install Linux on there but I am not sure which one will fit it best. Here are the Specs: 64m RAM, 2gb hard drive, 248 mhz. I know, it kind of sucks, but what the heck, it was $17.

If it's for general purpose:
If you're the adventurous type, check out the BeOS successor Haiku OS. It's NOT GNU/Linux, but really fast. The only problem is the number of apps available. I used it as a quick-booting email OS when it was in alpha 1. It is currently in alpha 4, so unstable.
http://haiku-os.org

Apart from Haiku, and with these specs, I'd check out the 10MB Tiny Core Linux edition which lets you add your own packages on top. Personally, I have run Zenwalk and Salix OS (both Slackware based distros) on IBM/Compaq Armada M700s, but it was better specc'ed than your notebook
http://tinycorelinux.net/intro.html
http://www.salixos.org/wiki/index.php/Home

If it's for appliances, we need more info

Please post the make/model of your netbook.

I'm pretty sure most modern distros require at least 128 MB of RAM to boot and work properly. I have never installed Linux on anything with less than 128 MB. On my old laptop which has 128 MB, it is painfully slow to do anything regardless of distro (I ran Salix on it).

You would need something very minimal for this.
Tiny Core, as posted above might be your best bet.

Thanks,Sigg3.net, your reply was very helpful. I have used Ubuntu before and liked it, but I don't have nuch more experience with Linux. If I wanted to instal Tiny Core could I just install it and it work, have a GUI, etc. Or do I need to track down packages? And to the rest of the people who replied, thanx for trying to help.

Shoot, look what I found.

LXDE

It only applies though for

Read the whole listing very carefully. I have no ties or what ever with this seller. Can't guarantee this will even work for ironmanzelda15
Just posting the info.

Edit: refer to my next post below before deciding what to do in this post.

Those low-cost netbooks with Windows CE usually use MIPS or ARM CPUs. We need to know more about the actual hardware before we can really help. So please post manufacturer and model or, if available, hardware specs of that system.

A forum in it's infancy. Not sure where it is going though.

http://socnetbooks.com/

Just promises so far.

Might be a red herring. I don't know. Did a little digging with in my previous post.

Forum site admin

Ahaaa. One and the same dude. Not sure what is up with this. So take my previous post with a grain of salt.

The last version of AntiX I tried ran in 64MB, although the browser was Dillo, which doesn't work with many sites. You could even run a word-processor, Ted!

Tiny Core is not really for very small computers; rather for creating your own set-up, embedded system, etc. If you want a GUI, it's 48MB, but the system loads into RAM, so adding programs increases that even before you actually run them.

Haiku needs 128MB.

You could always install FreeDOS!

If the netbook is ARM that complicates things a bit. The Linux kernel does support ARM, but you need a distro built for it.

Besides the issue with the processor, the problem with that laptop is also the small hard drive. With just 2GB,
you won't be able to install a full Linux distribution (a full Slackware would take about 5GB). You will have
to pick a distribution that lets you install only a base system (shell, Unix utilities, networking) and maybe
the X-Window system with a simple window manager such as fvwm2. Maybe Damn Small Linux will fit, if you have an Intel processor.

I am probably completely wrong here but if this is an older ARM device then won't it likely be slower with any Linux with X11 than Windows CE due to Linux+X11 being more processor intensive? This is only based upon use of devices and guesswork but I thought CE was designed from the bottom up to work on low-sped ARM CPUs whereas Linux is, originally at least, a desktop OS?
I'm not suggesting, by the way, that an embedded Linux system tailored to a device won't be faster than Windows CE, just that any distro you're going to install with a DE is likely to be heavier than Win CE.

Depending on what the netbook is. however, is this available:
http://wiki.meego.com/ARM#Running_MeeGo_on_ARM