Noobie here I have an old laptop, pentium 100 mhz, 800meg drive 24 megs ram.
I would like a distro that uses xwindows or some sort Gui based o/s, would hopefully detect my hardware automatically.
would prefer something relativily easy to install. I am fairly technical and can figure out most things with decent instructions.
I would to need to do web browsing of course, and an office compatible programs.
Looks like open office and firefox are out since both need 64megs of ram.
sugesstions for linux distro, office type program and browser.
I looked at deli linux but i did't quite understand hot to use it with vm ware, i wanted to install it on a newely formatted pc.

thanks

I suggest DamnSmallLinux. It's in the ISO section.

I would go with an earlier release of Slackware

-gerb

Damnsmall is probably your best bet. Considering your small hdd size

With 24MB of RAM, you might want to wait for DeLi's final release. The developer does his testing on an old box with 16MB RAM, so you should be fine. VMWare requires a running OS to work, so that's out of the question. But I guess DamnSmallLinux might work - I'm not sure if it'll run well (I've never tested with less than 64MB RAM - it runs beautfully with that, so less is possible - but how much less?).

The Slackware idea's interesting, too, but it would mean a whole lot of work.

Slackware / ZipSlack

Then again, I say the same thing from 486's to P4's, from Desktops to Servers

Never had an unsolvable problem in my years of using it!

I'd subscribe poetics suggestion. Just not do a "full install"...... I personally have an old Pentium 200 MMX with 32 MB Ram working as router/firewall with Slack 10.1.

Buy some RAM

I think this poor guy needs more than just RAM.

The mature code-base, professional development team and years of innovation and experience indicates that Windows XP should run really fast on an old box such as this.

Uh, Oh, hang on....

A P100 is not so bad, I have a 66MHz 486DX2/16MB 400MB hd, which runs OK with Slack. I mainly use it as a terminal but it runs X tolerably (once it's started).

And no, you certainly don't want to be using firefox. I have a PII-300/128MB laptop and firefox is a slow-arsed pile of bloat. (Come to think of it, firefox is a slow-arsed pile of bloat on my 2GHz Athlon.) Dillo (www.dillo.org) is a nice light browser, ideal for older hardware, though it still doesn't support frames yet. Of course, there's always lynx/elinks if you don't need a gui.

Oops, posted twice, wtf happened there? Damn firefox...

A sence of humor is alway appreciated

I would recommend gentoo. People with older hardware will want an optimized system on gentoo. Gentoo might be hard to set up at first though.

I wouldn't recomend running Gentoo on a system with a hardrive this small. Your going to need alot of space to compile programs with. Read this article from the Gentoo Wiki if you wana know more.

16MB RAM -64MB 700MB HD- 2.1Ghz. .I would like a linux install that I could (linksys)wireless pcmcia adapter. .Thanks