I am dual booting Win98 and Mandrake 9. I am having trouble with my video card and it has just pointed out to me how little I know about Linux. I have been using DOS and Windows for years. I want to install a minimal distro of Linux and from there I can install whatever I need when I need it. I have 4Gb of god knows what on the Linux partition. It takes 2 minutes to login to X. Compared to windows at about 25 seconds. How would I go about installing a minimal text installation. Could I do it from the Mandrake CD and would it jeopardise my windows partition? Any advice is greatly appreciated. I was lokoing at LFS but I would not know where to begin compiling a kernel or anything like that.

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other than that, you should easily be able to prune various bits from the system that is making things slower, if yuo did want a more low profile install, i'd say LFS is a little too in at the deep end, you can get a good feel for it with http://gentoo.org though

Damn Small Linux is also an option (no, I'm not employed by them, despite appearances) though I dunno if it would suit you.

Is the problem that your hardware is too slow when loading the window manager, or is it the loading of all the services and whatnot as the machine boots up?

One thing you can do is turn off all unneeded services. Open the mandrake control center and select drakXservices. You can see descriptions of each service and decide which ones to load during boot by checking/unchecking boxes. You can also try using IceWM as your graphical environment. It is much faster than KDE or Gnome and is installed by default in Mandrake 9.1 (I think). If not, you can install it from your CD. Even with these changes, boot up and shutdown will probably still be a little slower than windows, but you won't have to do it very often. If you want to free up disk space, open the control center and select "software management". You can see descriptions of installed software and remove all the stuff you don't want.

If you want to work with a lighter OS, you can try vector linux. It is described here (with links): http://www.distrowatch.com/table.php...ibution=Vector

I am using blackbox as my wm at the moment. I was hoping for just the minimum i.e. bash prompt and from there I could install whatever I needed. The thing I am forgetting is that the equivalent new release in windows if there is such a thing is probably real slow also. I maybe should look for older distros. My computer is 666 P3 with 256 RAM and 20GB. The Linux partition has 8Gb of that. I just don't want to make a mess of the MBR and whatnot.

I have just been to Linuxfromscratch.org and it has pointed me to From Power Up to Bash Prompt and there is a thing there to help with the minimalistic approach. Perfect. I read somewhere else that someone had a Linux boot up time of 10 seconds. I am soooo jealous.

That may have been me, that would include the BIOS screen, after LFS it was blindingly fast!

Cool

I am going to try it on an old computer first I think. I have a P75 lying around 'cos I don't have a clue really. I don't want to wreck anything. I have to figure out how to fix stuff if it does go wrong.