I have a old pent 2 333mhz & 64 meg ram dell pc and wanted to turn it into a working linux box. I installed redhat 9 on it and it was slower then christmas. what im looking for is a linux install with a graphical interface that will run better then redhat. im going to use this machine just soley as a email & ftp http server.... any ideas on a distro?

Slack or Debian, I guess.

The distribution is irrelevent (that is, as long as its not compiled for i686).

Its all about how you set it up.

Turn off any unneeded services, Redhat loves to start them all up by default.

Run a light GUI like Windowmaker, fluxbox, etc.

Get as much RAM as you can, linux can run on almost any processor, as long as it has enough RAM.

Red Hat is still pretty slow. Mandrake and SuSE are just as bad. They are VERY good on faster systems, but for the slower stuff, they just don't cut it.

You can get that system running REALLY nice - and fast. I personally use Slack. On a Celeron 333, total boot time (into KDE) is around 30 - 40 seconds. And it is almost 25 seconds with a custom 2.6 kernel.

If all you really want to use the box for is email, ftp and http serving, then why even install a GUI? The GUI is easily the "slowest" part of any distrubition. If you gotta have one, then go with a minimal one like blackbox or fluxbox. You could even check out some of the minimal distributions like muLinux, which will fit onto a few floppies and run great on hardware as low as a 486 with 16MB RAM (and its X server comes with three different window managers). Barring that, I'd suggest Slackware or Debian; install only what you need, and pare down the unnecessary services and you'll have no problems at all.

At work i have a PII 300MHz PC running Mandrake and increasing the RAM from 64MB to 128MB made a huge difference - now worse than Windows 2000 on a PIII 500MHz - perhaps increasing the RAM to 256+ would make it even more usable, also turn off any un-needed services.

This box is however mainly used for server stuff, so the GUI is closed when not needed, and only used as i find the Mandrake Config tools more sensible than Linux Conf....

I did install mandrake with a smaller window manager iceWM. Seems a lot faster then Redhats kde. I had hell getting the internal network card to configure... Maybe I should have turned it on in the bios!! Six hours later…. It worked!

I have to agree with wapcaplet. If your only going to be using a machine for ftp, http and email server, there really is no need for a GUI on it, as its only going to be taking way resources your other services could be using.

Even the lightest WM can take away from these as X in some cases will take away the resources.

Oh well, that's my two cents.

You can use any distribution. You have to do extra work to remove GUI or X Window Server if you use distributions that installs GUI by default. Then boot it up in runlevel 3.

If you want to use KDE and gnome features you have to use a desktop manager instead of a Window Managers. Theres XFCE if have any KDE or GNOME programs to run. Also theres EDE that is designed to be light wait but giving you features that KDE and GNOME has.

There are many more Window Managers and Desktop Managers at http://www.plig.org/xwinman/index.html.

i686 is Pentium II. Learn your x86 processor types.

Go to http://www.sandpile.org

Learn some manners.

People make mistakes. I saw the 233Mhz and I though "pentium1".