which one?
 

I am still a newbie and I use Xandros on my main system...my question is what would be the best distro to install on my second computer? It is a celeron 366 with 256 RAM, 16 M voodoo video, 2-3 gig HD.....it will be mainly for web surfing and educational games for my two daughters (3 & 5) so I need something relatively easy....any one?

i recommend mandrake and kde.

do you think the 366 is fast enough? and 6 MEG total HD is big enough?

mandrake and kde on a celeron 366 with 2-3 gig hard drive?? you are joking, right? i hope so, because that would be one of the worst things you could do.

get a small distro like vector or peanut, and use a minimal window manager like fluxbox or even windowmaker. you don't need anything else for web browsing/email, etc. libranet is also pretty good for just setting up a basic system, imho. definitely do not use gnome or kde.

thanks,

my biggest concern is setting up educational games for the kids so Vector or Peanut will both get a shot

peanut comes with KDE, but i think it is a stripped down version. if it runs fast enough, that might be your best choice, actually. if not, just use a wm.

no i'm not. while i have no comments on the celeron 366, i know mandrake without the development, server, and other stuff, takes about 1 gig. i recommend mandrake and kde because they are not command line oriented, which is what you want for kids.

A P2 350 does well. A celeron will not be quite so good - but I haven't tried one. I have a production mandrake box here installed on 3 gig drive no problem.

SuSE is pretty easy, and the personal version is reasonably cut down compared to Mandrake (only 1 CD, it has no server/dev stuff).

Just to add another one to the list... try KNOPPIX. You can run Linux off of their live CD. If you need to save any profile info, you can make a small partition at the end of your HDD. However, by the description of the computer, you might not have the fastest CD-ROM (which is pretty much what KNOPPIX boot/runs off of).

But I agree with rgiggs on Mandrake. It's easy to install (which your kids won't care about), has a broad support base (which your kids won't care for either), and it's pretty user friendly. And unless you need development tools and server packages, it doesn't require much HDD space. Although, I'm teaching my kids a programming language right after they learn to read, so suite yourself. I don't want them to be a twenty some-odd year old newbie like me.

ian

I'd say leave it... if they aren't curious about computers and how they work then they won't remember it and take to it. Unless they understand it, it's pointless.

true.

I have KDE running very smoothly on a Pentium MMX 233MHz...the catch is I have 192 Megs of RAM...so if you can get at least maybe 64 megs of RAM it may be useable...anything less and i'd say use an older KDE or something different all together.

in the first post, he said he had 256 RAM, which i presume to be 256 MB of RAM.

I have set up and run Mandrake on a system of nearly those specs but much less RAM, using fluxbox. That worked very well, except I had to ditch OpenOffice.org in favor of Abiword. It was actually a very sweet setup. I made keyboard shortcuts (Alt+F-keys) for browser, e-mail, IM, word processing, music player, the works. The user didn't have a Linux clue and didn't need one.
I love using Mandrake, but for limited use it is somewhat overkill. Downloading 3 CDs is a lot, if you are running a slow line. And having programs on CDs is not a very rational way of doing it, since - in the Linux world, a newer version of most programs have been released by the time the full distribution is released. This means you'll have your system - and houndreds and houndreds of sightly obsolete program packages on CD, which you will download updated versions of anyway. FTP installs - I remember SuSE having that? - is much more clever, if you have the line for it. If you are on a dial-up modem, however, getting everything on CD is the more practical approach.
As for using Knoppix, I have tried that on a slower PC, and that is terrible. The longer load times and boot time since all has to be accessed from CD really suck the life out of the process (I tried with the SuSE 9.1 Live-CD, too - that was so horribly slow, I threw it out).On the other hand, Knoppix is good for getting an impression of which demands can be met with Linux before you make an install - and it eliminates a lot of hardware setup hassles, since it pretty much detects anything. And the later versions can be installed to disk.