Looking for advise on a distro to try on a really old laptop. CPU is Pentium II 300 Mhz. Has 130 MB of memory, 6 Gig hard drive. I can pass along any other specs if helpful. Thanks for any suggestions.

AntiX 32-bit
ArchBang 32-bit
Crunchbang++
Possibly TinyCore (or MultiCore from the same people) or Puppy Linux?

Virtually any modern Linux is going to be a bit of a dog on that hardware. For example any modern browser will max it out, although some worse than others.

Perhaps Linux would not be your best option. You might check out one of the BSD variants that supports 32-bit Pentium.
I like FreeDOS, but getting the networking to fly might be too much of a pain.
KolibriOS is a totally from ASM operating system that should fly on that machine, but the software options are pretty limited unless you are an ASM coder.

Head over to Distrowatch and do a search for 32-bit distributions when you get a chance. That will give you some options for testing and comparing that might help you find what you want.

You are not going to get much service out of that machine!

The best bet is Damn Small Linux

Antix probably needs more memory: see FAQ. Q4OS probably needs more RAM as well: review. Bodhi certainly does Requirements

OpenBSD is much lighter than your lightest Linux distro and nowadays even has better support for what is now an odd, 32-bit architecture. So I would give that a try. The installation process is pretty easy and the documentation is by far the best of its kind.

You can probably even run the FVWM window manager on it but the odds of being able to use any any trendy graphical programs like a current productivity suite or browser are rather slim. If you stay mostly text only or else use very old-school graphical programs you might get some use out of the machine though.

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Damn Small Linux or ArchBang would might work for you.

I second trying Tiny Core Linux - http://tinycorelinux.net/

Something that old. I
I'd turn into a router

link

As others have suggested, the small Linuxes and OpenBSD, I would try NetBSD 10.0. But, this will probably give you a good answer on small Linuxes:


https://distrowatch.com/search.php

Note, on this system the OpenBSD kernel re-link step will probably fail. That will not cause issues with booting. That re-link can be disabled, but I do not remember how.

"And now for something completely different"
You might try Alpine Linux. You will want to read up on it first, but it is very small, very fast, and seriously optimal for low hardware. It does require a network connection to fully install. It runs well as either a server or desktop OS, as a virtual guest, as a minimal VM host, or a mixture: being refined for exactly such use.

IT is intended to be installed and then configured for the intended use via software installation and configuration rather than being optimized out of the box for a specific use. Also it avoids SystemD and does not depend upon Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL/Fedora, Arch, or any other distribution as a parent.

In some ways this is the Linux distribution that most reminds me of BSD back when we had a dozen

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As long as we're recommending veneration of the BSDs I'd suggest the OP give GhostBSD.

Gosh I wish the QNX floppy was around. What an awesome distro.

Anyway might be able to run test based like Toms.

See if zipslack or such.

Slitaz might work.

Part of this may be that if you had a swap file on some fast access it can help these old systems.

Two QNX Demos are archived at Toasty Tech, which might also have ideas for which window managers might be lightweight enough for this project. QNX would be perfect for this, but again graphical programs (browser and productivity) if this is to be a laptop are another matter. There is also one version of the QNX demo over at the Internet Archive.

GhostBSD is fine in some contexts, but its not usable on a 300 MHz Pentium II with 130 MB of RAM. Even OpenBSD would be pushing the limit as i386 is no longer a fully supported architecture. NetBSD, which has already been suggested, might be the way to go, if BSD is an option.

But of the Linuxes it is likely that Alpine, mentioned already, is among the lightest. I used to run it in on some production servers and appreciated the simplicity. A big plus with Alpine is that it is free from systemd, thus some of that simplicity is through the avoidance of that hot mess. As a server system, the Alpine which I ran had basically almost nothing other than the few processes running which I had added. So +1 for Alpine though 130 MB of RAM will likely not be enough for a GUI unless special considerations are made such as using only a really lightweight window manager and skipping an attempt at running a full blown desktop environment.

Some folks did add in some network cards but the guys at QNX hit the mini distro out of the park.

I might have a few versions on some backup.

For a while QNX 4 was basically free to use.