what is the best Linux distro for Gateway Solo 2500?

Hi,

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Rather old hardware. You have not provided the specs for this hardware therefore a member must search to find something that you should provide to us in order for us to aid you.
You can look at the Newbie forum sticky: Newbie alert: 50 Open Source Replacements for Windows XP for a list of Gnu/Linux with descriptions for each. You can choose from that list. I recommend you look at 'puppy' as a possible Gnu/Linux on that old hardware. Be sure to increase the memory to the max for that machine if possible.

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Hope this helps.

Welcome to LQ!
That computer's a new one on me! It looks as if it was very popular back in 2000… Luckily, the details are available, and you can even read the manual on-line. The big question is, has it been upgraded? The original specification was
Pentium II
128 MB RAM
4 GB HD

If it hasn't been expanded, then for general purpose computing there's really only one distro: AntiX.

Download antix-13.2_386 from here
http://sourceforge.net/projects/anti...al/antiX-13.2/
and burn onto a CD. You can set the Gateway to boot from a CD by pressing F2 at boot-up.

You will need to partition the HD — see
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gparted.html

If you have the basic machine, create
/dev/sda1 mounted as / formated ext3 occupying 2 GB — where the OS and programs go
/dev/sda2 as swap partition occupying 256 MB
/dev/sda3 mounted as /home formated ext3 for the rest of the drive — where your files go

PS I've just realised you've used your email address as your name. That's going to be harvested by every spammer's spider! Ask the moderators to let you change it befor you get the world's largest spam collection.