neocookie,

Have you tried turbolinux?

No. Do you have to pay for that one?

Had a quick look, and I'm sorry to say even as nice as it looks its just too bloated.

I'm looking to create a system that has the bare minimum required to surf the net, save the odd image, and write the odd letter.

Bastically, I was thinking:

• xFce for the GUI (Nice, simple, non-cluttered)
• OpenOffice.org - Robust simple office suite
• Mozilla Firefox - standards-compliant browser, with the power of Mozilla.
• Mozilla Thunderbird - Simple to use mail client.
• Gimp - you never know when you'll need to fettle with a piccy
• Standard utilities: Zip, FTP, Calc, PDF Viewer, Media Player, etc.

That'll keep the everything to a minimum, and keep the system light. I'll never use KDE or GNOME, so there's no point having them on the system. I'll never use Apache, MySQL, Perl... so leave them off, unless something I install requires them. The lighter the system, the less I have to worry about.

This box is going to be used by a family member, who just wants email, web access, and to write the odd letter. Thats it. Why install 5GB worth of apps they'll never use?

Thats why I'm looking at LinuxFromScratch. The mainstream distros are just too bloated for that box.

Thanks, though. I'll keep turbolinux in mind for another box i'm building.

The CD drive may be old enough that, while it is a standard drive, it is not one SBM will see. The motherboards chipset is the common 430HX (per Dells support site) that I have used with SBM on other motherboards, so the CD drive is the most likely variable. I'd slave another, later drive for the install.
If it still poots I'd also hook up the hd and CD on seperate channels if they are not already so.

On the good side it will take a 233MMX.
http://docs.us.dell.com/docs/systems/dzer/Jumpers.htm

Thanks for that. I'll hit ebay now and see whether there are any 233MMX chips going cheap.

The machine seems to have slowed down recently though. Might be just me working on a P4 machine. Dunno.

Still, I'd rather find a floppy distro which suits my needs. If there's one that will work for that machine, then it'll probably work in any machine, which is useful.

neocookie,

the smallest distro i've found so far is vectorlinux. the web is http://www.vectorlinux.com.
the only thing is that I'm not sure that it's gonna be easy to install.

What about Gentoo? That'll let you install only the apps you want.

http://www.gentoo.org

Gentoo is still quite large. I installed it on my server (before it went down). I'm looking to install *only* what i *need*, which means base system, programs which will be used, and dependancies.

Looks like I'm going with slack. 9.1 has seen my network card (which is a start), and I've been told that you don't have to install everything, which is just what I wanted. There's no point having KDE/Gnome on the box when it won't be used!

Nightmare installing on a Dell Optiplex indeed. I have been trying serveral differnet distros on my cousins pc without much luck.

First it DOES let you boot from cd. Go into your bios and tell it to do so.

I tried fedora core 1. It was able to detect everything except the sound card. I then tried installing suse 8.2, which detected everything (even the sound card - but there was no sound output.) Right now I'm dloading mandrake 10. I've heard good things about it, so I want to see how that will be.

I tried to install slackware, but the boot cd gives errors so I am never able to start setup (the discs MD5 checked, so they are good.)

I'll let you guys know what happens.

I stuffed mandrake 9.2 onto my dell GXi .......just not sure how to navigate file system and install programs though .

No, it DOESN'T! I've been in the BIOS, many a time. There's no option for it.

I'm using the floppies available from the slackware site to start the install. Everything's looking good so far!

Thanks anyway pezplaya.

But it does! Lol. At least my cousins does. Thats what I have been doing to try to install linux on that thing. I just burned mandrake 10 on and im going to try to install it later on today. For some reason slackware will not get me to a prompt, it gives me errors before the cd finishes booting. :/

No. I've got a 5166L. There's no option. I've even updated the BIOS to the latest version to check whether that will allow me. Nope.

Try the boot disks. Keep the CD in the drive, then stick in the boot.i in the floppy. Follow that with the install.1 and install.1, and you should end up with a command prompt. Login, and enter network. This found my NIC no problem, reading the modules from the CD. Then, typing setup got me into the setup program. I'm now waiting for the packages I've selected to install, set the environment... reboot... done.

Thanks for the recommendation of slack!

Ahh finally. I just got home. Operation install linux on my cousins pc is a success. I downloaded mandrake 10 and installed it on her optiplex and it worked great. I got the sound card working, it found the video card, nic, and everything. Finally something that works good.




good luck neo