Building a Frankenstein

Keardan · 12-17-2009, 07:41 AM

Hello, I'm a complete Noob to building my own box, so this is my first attempt to do so. It currently runs XP, and has no access to the Net. I have other computers for that.

I'm putting together a computer from spare parts and junk that I have lying around. I'm slaving a 40 gig HD to another (also 40 gig) , got 512 Mb ram, P3 processor. Any recommendations on a linux distro to load on this? I'm a little familiar with Slackware, and was just going to load that on there, but I would like some advice.

Thanks for the help.

linus72 · 12-17-2009, 07:50 AM

How about trying many different ones and see which ones like the hardware the most?

if you want some help on setting up a box that will boot 10 or more distro's
most from the same partition ala usb boot/livecd boot

this way you can also get familiar with grub,etc too

AngTheo789 · 12-17-2009, 10:53 AM

Try Slackware or Damn-Small-Linux, and use fluxbox, XFCE or WindowMaker as your window manager on X-Windows.

lazlow · 12-17-2009, 11:41 AM

With 512 ram you should be able to run virtually any distro. With the specs you have listed the larger (bloated/full featured depending on point of view) distros will of course not run as fast as a smaller (striped down)distros. I run Centos5.4(full featured distro) on a 1Ghz PIII with 512ram as a media front end in the living room, works fine for that task.