I just got my hands of an old IBM Aptiva, it had a 100mhz processor, 24mb ram and a 1gb HD. Anyone have any suggestions on which distro would run best on this thing. Thinking of trying to make it a game box for the kids. I have a copy of basiclinux 1.9 (ram disk) but basic linux requires dos to be on the machine before you can put it on the hd well I don't have a copy of dos so that is out of the question. Does anyone know of another distro that Is easy to install but yet small enough to fit on a 1GB HD.

Try Slack: www.slackware.com . Basiclinux is Slack-based.
The space a distro takes depends on what you install. things like kde would probably be too big, so don't plan on installing that.

I have a copy of Slackware 8.1 but for the live of me I can't figure out how to make a boot disk, (I can't boot from a cd-rom the machines bios won't do it, so I have to have a boot disk, I have been going through all the howto pages and man pages I can find, I can't use loadlin because I don't have dos on the maching and lilo just blew my mind any suggestions

This will get your Basic started, if you want.

http://www.freedos.org/

Hello Cjstm,

There is a lot of info about slack on there site, but if you don't have much experience and just want to try out, use SUSE or knoppix. Suse recognizes a lot off hardware, without any problem and has an easy install.

If you have more experience there are some differences but mostly in look and feel. In the end, you can make up every OS the way you want it............


CB

If you have a working windows install you can use RAWRITE from a command prompt. Just throw in a floppy, save the boot disk image (most likely the bare.i) to your c: drive, save the rawrite program to your c: and then type:

C:\>RAWRITE bare.i a:

and it will write the image to the floppy for you.

You can also try smart boot manager, the link for it is with the slackware root disks. Same thing, RAWRITE it to a disk, and boot off of it. It may allow you to run the slackware install off the CD even though your CD isn't bootable.

slight

I suggest that you use Smart Boot Manager instead of a boot disk. It let's you choose which device you want to boot from.

To all those that replied Thank you very much for your help. I did some checking and decided to try Peanut Linux ( it is slackware based), it had exactly what I needed. It has an easy to use GUI for the install, it takes a little while to make all the disks but it is real easy to install on older machines.

A 100MHz CPU, 24M RAM, and "make it a game box for the kids" doesn't seem to fit together very well, unless the kids are very young and will be satisfied with a snakes level of gaming.

Don't figure on much of a GUI kinda interface.