Resurrecting a retired AMD K6 350Mhz w/196MB ram and 6GB HD (fujitsu). Mother board is a VIA 5MVP3. It had w98, wouldn't boot anymore. Put new battery in and tried numerous distro's. Puppy latest, Puppy 3, SLAX, Sarge, DSL, Antix, Gentoo, RedHat WS and RedHat9, etc...... Every thing I've tried gets partially installed then hangs, or it gets all the way installed and then hangs after reboot.

I've reformatted the HD, ran Fdisk, re-installed w98. Can't get this computer to run again. There was no problem with system before I retired it several years ago. It's been stored in a clean, dry, warm area.

You could try one of these, or may be a very old version of Slackware. I would go for Slackware 8.1 but you still can get Slackware 3.3 -- in the latter case bear in mind that some of your hardware could not be supported yet

Debian should run easily on that system, just don't do a default installation. During Debian installation you will come to the deselect stage where it asks what general package bundles you want to install. It will have "desktop" pre-selected and possible one or two other groups. Uncheck them all using arrow keys and space bar. Upon reboot you will have a base minimal operating system with command line only, it should be pretty responsive at this point.
I usually only download DVD 1 of the set. After reboot into command line I issue the commands below to get a lean fast system with a heavy desktop environment on my systems which include a HP Pavilion 8756c which has a Pentium 3 850MGHz processor, 128MB Ram, it handles it quite well, over time I'll install some more light weight applications I need on it and it still handles it very well.
The only thing I would do differently in your case is to not install KDE & kdm (KDE display manager), install a lightweight desktop environment instead (Like Xfce) and possibly XDM as a display manager. Stay away from modern "candy" type applications. I always use KDE, so I have little knowledge in the light weight desktops, and don't know if they are on the 1st DVD/CD. If you can do a net-install, so much the better, no need to use a DVD or CD.
During initial installation, in the dselect stage I have to select "standard" or something, (the bottom selection) when installing on my big desktop because without it I have administrative issues, (don't have some admin. privileges even as admin.). This doesn't happen with my laptop where I uncheck everything in the deselect stage, not sure why, don't care, you can play around with that if you choose to re-try Debian.
I've tried my method using aptitude instead of apt-get also, aptitude installs both Gnome and KDE with the commands below, which would be detrimental in your case, stick with "apt-get" till you know how to configure aptitude to avoid installing too much.
The last command, (/etc/init.d/kdm start), brings up KDE graphical desktop.

I have a K6-III/450MHz with 128MByte. It currently runs Slackware 12 (functions as a server, so no GUI, but if I remember correctly X works). I also ran XUbuntu 6.06 on it (not the fastest).
Motherboard is an Asus (P5A if I remember correctly). Major difference with your system is that I have a 2GByte and a 80GByte disk in it.

Hello,

I'm running an old PII 333MHz with 13GB HD and 458 MB Ram. I'm running Slackware-12 on it
As a Window-Manager I'd suggest fluxbox or xfce. Try to increase your RAM.

Markus

.
The newest Vector Linux will probably be fine
on this old K6.

....

Try PClos Tiny-Me or Linux Mint lite or you could try an older distro of Puppy-2.17.1. Any of them should work as I've setup an AMD k-6 300Mhz box running Tiny-Me

I'll try it. Are there any bios settings I need to be aware of? As stated earlier, this machine only gets so far and then hangs. It will finish a complete install of w98 and then hang during first boot after install. It can go into safe mode but won't detect hardware. Knoppix seems to run ok but it won't detect the HD. While sitting for a couple years, the battery went dead and cmos settings were lost. I don't remember having any special settings and I don't see anything in there that reminds me of previous issues. The machine ran for years till bloatware and xp made it not so useful.

This could be the issue to address. If possible, try to reset the BIOS settings to the "out of the box" ones. It is difficult to tell you more as we know nothing specific about your BIOS. Try to review all BIOS settings anyway.

There could be some parameters at boot time or configuration options of the Linux kernel you could set so that it do not rely upon the BIOS to check your hardware characteristics but I am not aware of it, may be look at that or somebody could tell you.

Tiny-Me is a Live CD so you can try it right from the CD if it works and you like it click install and follow prompts.

After downloading the Tinyme I got the peculiar smell of something burning..... one of my main computers lost a power supply. Now the old K6 really is retired, had to steal it's supply for the other system.

I had tried default settings (of course a new battery) and just about every feature in the bios that even remotely seemed relevent. Nothing I tried made it work for the 98 or any of the before mentioned OSs. I didn't try a new HD, probably a size limitation. Don't have a known good one smaller than 80gb. I think I'll find a teenager and give it to him.