Found old hardware to tinker with. Which distro?
 

I have my girlfriend's old rig that I can hook up and tinker with.

AMD Sempron 2400+ 1,67 Ghz
ASRock K7VT4A+
1GB DDR SDRAM
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
Optiac DVD RW AD-7200A

I still need to find an old ATA hard drive, but I can manage that.

1) Which 32-bit distribution would you recommend to run on this system?

2) Can I set up a Linux / Win 98 dual boot ?

thanks

Most 32-bit distributions will work fine with this one. I guess it depends if you want a full desktop or more of the command line. I'm guessing a full desktop. I would try Debian, Ubuntu, or SUSE. I think it's also less about the system specs which you brought up versus peripherals like a wireless device if you intend to use that versus wired Ethernet. If it will be wired Ethernet, then I think you'll be fine.Yes you absolutely can, I'd recommend that you install W98 first. Actually I'd recommend that you don't because W98 is not worthwhile; however I get your point that you can't really run Win7 or Win8 on that computer. But W98 is no longer supported, I think even with a license, there may be an activation issue, not sure. It's an older system and you're reclaiming it via installing Linux, I wouldn't bother adding Windows to the mix. And likely you have other Windows machines now?

Since the idea is to tinker with it, I'd suggest doing that solely with Linux and instead install multiple distributions to "play" with versus worry about putting Windows on it.

I'm not even sure about Windows 98 yet, I just have that childish fascination with DOS games from my youth. It wouldn't even have internet access - it would be just legacy hardware with the sole purpose of running DOS games.

Wired internet it is.

I run dosbox on AntiX. It plays all kind of dos games. No need for Windows.

Just in case. you decide to tke my suggestion and run MX-14 or AntiX 13.2.

Apart from the fact that I have a Sempron 2600+ and no video card, that's just like this computer! I can run any Linux except Mageia. KDE is sluggish, and my lack of graphics acceleration rules out Unity, Gnome, and Cinnamon.

If you're new to Linux, I'd suggest
1. Mint Mate edition: beginner-friendly, vanilla-flavoured, runs on anything.
2. Salix Xfce version: less mainstream, as it's built on Slackware, but that gives you Slack's famous stability and Salix has a very good user manual. Get the live CD version and use gparted to set up the HD before running the installer.
https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gparted.html

If you want to run DOS, install DOS!
http://www.freedos.org/
http://www.dosgames.com/
You need to create a very small partition for DOS — less than 2GB

I'd say for partitions
/dev/sda1 10GB for Linux root
/dev/sda2 1 GB for DOS
/dev/sda3 1 GB Linux swap
/dev/sda4 the rest for Linux home

Win98 just asks for product key. Activation is not strictly needed.

You don't have a hard disk?
If the motherboard has a USB 2.0 port (or above), then you could try using a Linux distro from a USB.
This will mean you wouldn't need a ATA hard drive.

A Windows compatible usb-creator like Pendrivelinux should let you use a number of linux distros off a usb.
Once you boot from each OS, you can see which ones are compatible with your hardware 'out of the box'.
To save the files on your usb, you'll need to choose an OS which provides 'persistence'.

I will get an 80Gb hard drive in the next few days.

If you really have some time to kill, are somewhat skilled at using the command line and basic unix utilities, and you want a very tight system you could try Linux From Scratch and use a Gentoo or Arch live cd as a temporary environment to built your system. The documentation is rather quite easy to understand.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

You could go on Youtube and see which distros and desktop environments you would like.
Another good place to learn about linux distros is of course Wikipedia.
I found you have to be knowledgable about the basics of linux first before taking the plunge. There is a learning curve. It's about a week or two.
After that, it'll be more than worth it.

I've tried Ubuntu, but it doesn't support the graphics card, so that's just a no go - besides being too slow. After a failed installation of Linux Mint Mate (hanged up twice towards the end of the installation), and multiple failed downloads of Puppy Linux Slacko (fails just before finishing download), I've managed to install LXLE - and it runs.

Browsing is sluggish and almost useless when it comes to anything a little bit more intensive like facebook, or 9gag. Flash won't even load. I've downloaded the Chromium browser, which worked great under my Mint Cinnamon - however, here it won't even start.

There is sound, thank god.

Simple applications like office stuff work, which is good, I guess when I need a backup machine for writing papers.

This machine is from 2004, and I just want to salvage it.

So, I have a working OS, what now?

Good to know you have a linux distro running.
With 1gb of RAM I would've thought you could run most distros - although some GUIs can be a bit bloated.

If you install GRUB bootloader, it should open on startup and give you options to boot any one of the OSs you have on hard disk. So GRUB should allow you to dual boot between Windows and LXLE.

I imagine Chromium may be a bit bloated. How about using a linux browser like Iceweasel or something? It should be a more slimline browser.

I don't use Adobe Flash. Youtube can run on html5. So every time I boot I put this link on the browser address bar:https://www.youtube.com/html5?gl=GB. I then select html5 player at the bottom of the page - and I can watch Youtube without Flash!

You could consider adding a swap file or swap partition. This should free up the RAM if it's getting clogged up.

I've decided to leave this computer as it is for now. I can listen to music or watch movies on it - so it's going to handle media at certain events where I wouldn't carry my main system.

I've realized that it would be way more practical to dual boot Windows 7 / Linux Mint. After a month on Linux, I've got about enough experience with it. It's really neat, and I'd use it as my main system, but Windows 7 is a good safety net.

that "NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200"
will be a problem for most new distros
it uses the 173 nvidia driver a
and that card and driver are unsupported by nvidia

centOS 6.6 will be able to use it but you might have to DOWNGRADE xorg to a version LESS THAN 1.13
iffy on Debian 7.7 ( i do not know first hand)

now
CentOS 5.12 WILL have no problems
it uses xorg 1.10
so the 173 driver WILL work

You need to inform yourself before posting.
At this time of posting there is no CentOS "5.12".
The current CentOS 5 release is 5.11.