Hi Everyone

I'm new to linux, but nevertheless, i am building a "listening center" for a small store that lets people preview music before they buy the CD. I am making it by using a web of html sites with simple buttons to listen to certain songs. I'm using an old dell optiplex g1 from about 1999. (Pentium II MMX @400MHz, 96MB RAM).

I've tried installing mandrakelinux 10.0 using gnome. and it runs HORRIBLY slow and i cant even open a web browser without it freezing. What stuns me is that the same distribution + gnome ran great on on another computer (pentiumII MMX @ 350 MHz, 320MB RAM) but i later uninstalled it for windows xp pro because i couldn't get wine to run programs i needed.

so i'm a bit confused why its so slow

Can any of you recommend a fast distribution and a fast desktop environment thats good for my case. but still one with a easily navigate able GUI. The only program i need to run is mozilla firefox, and some type of media player that can run like a plug-in in firefox to play mp3 files.

Thanks for any advice you can give me.

You need more ram if you want to run gnome or kde, 96 mb won't cut it. Or run a lighter window manager instead. I'd recommend Slackware as a distro for it as well.

If you're a newbie I wouldn't recommend slackware. Keep your Mandrake 10.0 and just run a lightweight window manager like xfce and see how things go.

I don't think the distro really matters for your application.

Sounds like the problem might be video card.

Switching the card on the non-working system with the one from the working system might help to isolate the problem.

No offense to mandrake, but I think even with a lightweight WM, vector will outclass it in speed (and it's pretty easy to use).. Espeically on such little RAM!! Get some more RAM mate, it's cheap.

96 megs of RAM is plenty for fluxbox, i'm using it now with 256 megs of RAM and its smooth. I would also agree though that slackware would be better than mandrake especially with a lightweight window manager.

Thanks for you're help guys

i reinstalled mandrake, with gnome and kde, and when it asked for what window manager i liked i selected icewm. it starts up fast and runs smooth, but (please don't call me stupid) i see no icons on my desktop, from the menu on the task-bar, i can run programs fine, but how would store stuff in a folder, if there are no folders, and no way (as far as i see) to create any? I opened terminal, and used common commands like "cd /" and "dir" and i can navigate through my hard drive like that, but isn't there any GUI folders? i opened mozzilla that was pre-installed, and, a relief, the Internet works, and i typed "/" in the address bar and could visually see the contents of the hard drive, but not in a way i could like with gnome, kde, or windows, or am I just blind and missing something?

please help (a little)

PROBLEM SOLVED

actually, dispite what people say, KDE runs alsmost as fast as icewm, fast enought for me

things are great and even wine works, kinda

no more problems, so far

thanks everyone

In case anyone else comes across this thread and is confused by IceWM at first:
a Window Manager is not a complete desktop environment like KDE or GNOME and doesn't provide a GUI file manager like those two do. Assuming you have KDE installed you could easily run the KDE file manager (konqueror) in ICEWM by typing 'konqueror' at a terminal.