the best distribution overall?
 

For a Intell PII 450, and what would be the distribution with less conflicts, on a dual boot with windows 2000?
PS. Mandrake wouldn't work, LILO kept messing up!.

You might try Puppy Linux. You should also consider changing the title of your post. It's a bit misleading IMO. Perhaps something like..."Best distro for old hardware" or "Best distro for computer with PII 450".

I'm not sure there's anything current with a GUI that will run on a PII 450.

@havana97,

Please read the sticky on this topic:

Linux Newbies - How To Choose A Distro

A lot of thought was put into it in order to give guidance to those with your exact question.

In the Things To Consider section, #2 discusses hardware. Meanwhile that whole section also discusses various aspects where people may consider in a logical fashion, which preferences they have that they had not yet considered.

It depends on the use case scenario.

I hope you are aware of that there are 50 Euro mainboards with soldered cpu where you only need one second hand ram module, an existing power supply to get a recent computer. Not only you have a recent computer platform, you also have much less power consumption, and can use recent webbrowsers and other software.

I do not like those cheap arm boards, but these also run for an 100 euro budget if you include everything a kinda recent ubuntu. do not get fooled by the mainboard only 35 euro carrot, with all the components you end also at 100 euro budget.

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When your only issue is the bootloader you can use any bootloader available. I assume you know how to setup a bootloader.

From the gpu and cpu standpoint I would suggest my 50 euro soldered mainboard cpu route, or to buy something cheap second hand.

I have a pentium 3 notebook with windows 2000, and I just keep it for the serial port feature lying around. because it is native windows 2000 serial port computer. i do not see it feasable for any use case in these days. And we talk about a computer dating around 1998 or so.

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I agree with the other posters, that you should focus on finding a suitable graphical user interface which your gpu can handle.

Also you should give it a thought what you want to do with such a low performance platform. WEbbrowsing is out of the question. maybe writing basic text documents or spreadsheets.

Also I am kinda certain that you will need 32bit linux, which only gentoo linux afaik supports anymore. And for gentoo, you need a bigger host to crosscompile, or to outsource the compile jobs.
Most linux distros have ditched the 32bit linux branch a year ago.

Also from a gentoo stand point of view, the pentium 2 hardly supports any modern cpu instructions. It will be hard because these instructions are a basic requirement for most software.

I would not use anything older as a penryn cpu, or any amd or newer, for linux these days.

I would also not use any box with less than 3GiB / 4 GiB of RAM + penryn cpu these days.
From the harddrive point of view, anything with 20GB is far than enough.

I think the major issue would be lack of PAE-compatibility (I think, not 100% certain this cpu lacks it)(many distro's that are still 32-bit have a PAE kernel and lacking that ability will fail to boot), lack of SSE instructions (most browsers won't work). I think Slackware would still support being installed on this hardware, although there's no chance the default install (kde) would actually RUN at an acceptable pace. Could give Absolute linux a try, it's Slackware specifically made for old pc's.

You could also try some of the specialist distro's for older hardware, like anti-X core, LegacyOS, or tiny core. Not sure if any of them default to a PAE kernel or not though.

The real problem is that this is going to be very slow. AntiX is going to be the best bet, although I think they recommend a Pentium III and 256MB.

You don't have a PAE problem, as that's only missing in Pentium I and the earliest Pentium M. The real problem is the lack of SSE2. The only browser with javascript that will work is Firefox, which will be very, very slow.

Slitaz might be a possibility, particularly an older release.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SliTaz

Upgrading your hardware will give you a much more pleasant Linux experience. This blog posting has some good advice how to find a better computer for free, or very low cost: https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/1...-old-computer/

Good luck!

Hi havana97,

Up until 2016, I used to run linux on a couple of 1997-era IBM Thinkpad 600E laptops ... they were PII 450 class. I used them as "jukeboxes", connected to Logitech speaker systems before converting the house over to Sonos ...

The best solution I found after trying out a *pile* of distros, was Puppy Linux, Classic Pup 2.14x version. It worked very well and supported all the hardware (even the *extremely* finicky Crystal Semiconductor sound card). The only other system I got working on those laptops is no longer really an option - it was the 3.13 kernel-era 32-bit version of Arch (frozen at an optimal config). Arch recently discontinued support for 32-bit systems.

I recommend Classic Pup 2.14x.

Cheers.

Tinycore linux @ http://www.tinycorelinux.net/downloads.html

http://tiny.slitaz.org/

:idea :

IMO, on hardware of that age, OpenBSD would be a better choice.

One way to get a free PC is to put an ad on craigslist for 'computer disposal', or 'electronic waste recycling'. Put in the ad, 'email description of items and if they're working or not.' Some people won't know the specs of the PC they want to get rid of, so you might get stuck with a few junkers you'll have to throw out. But you should get a good one within a short time.

My uncle works for a local government agency. They are continually turning over their computer inventory. The systems that are out of warranty get chucked. Currently they're disposing of Core i7 first gen. systems. That's just an example of what age hardware people might be disposing of currently. I can't get you one of those. He lives far away from me.