Hi All,

I would want some help to decide which distro I may install on one of my computer, the config for my PC is:

Celeron 433 Mhz
128 mb SDRam
4.3 gb Harddisk( 1.4gb partition Windows 98, Remaining i can use for linux)
Nvidia Vanta TNT2
OPL3sax ISA sound card

I have already tried installiing Ubuntu(my xserver does not work), Red Hat Linux 9.0 currently installed( the system drags, if anybody can help me tweak this system so that it runs faster will also be helpful)

Please help me decide what distro will work on this PC, I have heard Mandrake works smoothly on older PC's.

Thanks for your help
Subu

You probably can still find RedHat 7.x. I used it on a 333MHz Dell a couple of years ago and was pretty happy with it. Be sure to check the RedHat site for security patches. Good Luck!

You didn't say what Window Manager or Desktop Environment you are using (if any). KDE and Gnome are pretty memory hungry and with only 128 megs of RAM you will find that the system will start swapping stuff to the disk after you start a few programs, which will slow your PC down considerably, and all that eye candy can put a toll on the CPU.

Some lightweight Window Managers are Blackbox, Fluxbox, IceWM, Window Maker and XFCE. I have Fluxbox on a 500 Mhz system that is running Debian and it runs OK. Just my 2 cents.

hi zekke and ritme99,

thanks for your reply,

well currently i am using Gnome on Redhat 9.0, but i never gave a look at the other desktop managers , and i am sure the Redhat 9.0 distro has the packages for XFCE, i will surely check them out; as i did try xfce when i once installed fedora core 3.

and still if that doesnt work, i have Redhat 7.x distro with me, i think i will settle with that.

thanks again,

subu

Any distro would do as long as you use a light window manager like xfce or fluxbox. KDE and GNOME may work, but they could be really sluggish unless you add more memory. I really don't recommend Redhat 9 and below because these products are no longer recieving updates, but they may work on your system. Something like Slackware can work fine for you and Slackware is optimised for 486 intel processors.

I have Mandrake and Fedora installed on vintage machines.
Celeron 400 3Gb HD 66Mhz FSB.

I think that Slackware is a more responsive distro on older machines than either. By that I mean that apps open more quickly, compiling is quicker ect. Less running in the background. You could also turn those unused processes off in Mandrake.

It is not as easy to install as Mandrake or Fedora but easier than Debian in my opinion.

The single best thing that you can do to speed up that linux box is to add more RAM. Put 512 Mb of RAM in that box and you will notice a big difference. You won't get those network stalls anymore. Web pages won't sit there waiting to load any more.

You may also want to look at hdparm to see if the hard drives are being used to their maximum speed. Look at the man pages for hdparm. And of course you will have to have 80 conductor IDE cables to get the drive to run over UDMA33.

I have Mandrake and Fedora on several PII type machines, with 256MB RAM or better and they are good usable box's. Put some RAM in them and I think those Fedora FC2 box's run every bit as good as XP box's.