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I have an old Compaq Deskpro SFF series (500MHZ) with 64MB Ram.
1. Which dist would be best suited to this machine?
2. I have a floppy drive but no CDRom
3. I have a USB HDD that I can see in MSDOS with a FAT32 partition on it
4. Can I install from the USB HDD and which dist would let me boot with a floppy with USB drivers (Linux) so I could install from this media.
Debian would allow this, but then - it would probably be easier to simply connect it to the Interweb and make a network installation. For this, you make a couple of bootfloppies, load the drivers and grab the system from the Debian servers. The Debian site has a Floppy installer manual.
You should consider a distro for old hardware, e.g. Damn Small Linux.
Otherwise, I don't think there is much difference which distro do you use. It depends mostly on graphical environment. Don't install gnome or KDE. Use something like fvwm (my favourite) or fluxbox. Do not start services you can avoid. Do not use huge programs (as openoffice). Buy more RAM.
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