What would be my best bet for a Linux distro around this era i386 Pentium 4 512Mb of Ram and a 20GB hard drive? I thought there might be some Linux vets from this era

One suggestion is to browse the LinuxQuestions User Choice Awards for each year. This will show you, for each year, which distros have been considered the "best" by our community. For example here are the 2010 results (spoiler alert: Ubuntu was the winner):

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...inners-861440/

Please understand that any old distro you try should be for educational/historical purposes only. It is not safe or desirable to run an obsolete, unsupported operating system for ordinary, everyday use.

That's my software advice on choosing a distro. My hardware advice for your Pentium 4 computer is to recycle it. You can probably find a better computer for free in the trash.

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Thank you, I will look into distro of the year. I inherited it so it means something to me. It came with XP on it

Windows XP has been "end of life" and totally unsupported since 2008. Your computer is 10+ years beyond the life cycle of the software it was designed to run. So I guess the optimistic way to look at it is, any usage you get from at this point is "bonus" time.

Since the computer has sentimental value and you would like to keep it, my advice is to choose 1 specific task, that is light on resources, and dedicate your old computer to that 1 specific task. Here are some fun project ideas for low-spec old hardware: https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2007/0...-old-computer/

(Note: The blog is from 2007, so some of the details might be a little outdated, but the basic concepts might still be relevant.)

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Thank you again, I’m just thinking about running some old games on it for its main purpose

"i386 Pentium 4 512Mb of Ram and a 20GB hard drive" This isn't terrible specs and there should be some almost current systems that could work on it. Specialized distro's like austrumi, antix, arch, slitax and maybe the puppy's or even dsl could work. There are plenty of choices I'd think.

Thanks jefro r, I may try that. I was looking at lubuntu i386 alternate edition. I’m guessing I’ll have to install from a cd for these so im ripping a couple of choices and seeing how they perform.

You inspired me to check out some old distros that I used to use back in the day. I'm playing around with SliTaz 1.0, vintage 2008, running it as a virtual machine. Htop says I am using only 38mb of ram... if that won't run on your old hardware, nothing will!

Naturally it is outdated software, incapable of doing things we take for granted in the year 2019, like posting on Facebook or Instagram. But for playing vintage games, I think Linux can be a great way to breathe life into old hardware! I see that SliTaz 1.0 came with only two games pre-installed, Bastet and nInvaders. So probably not a good choice for your needs, but a fun bit of linux nostalgia for me.

What I would do in your shoes is look for old gaming distros. These would have come on a CD or DVD with a whole suite of preinstalled games and emulators. You wouldn't even have to connect to the internet (thereby eliminating the security risk of connecting an "end of life" operating system to the internet) and use it as a standalone arcade machine.

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I’ll have to look snowpine! I have found that antix runs Debian 9 stable with init.rc and can run on this setup! This isn’t my main machine but I just think it’s neat to repurpose old technology!

Anti-X was designed for older computers so I think you'll like it.
Give it a spin when you can.

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=antix

I'm running MX Linux which is for older pc's and it's very light and fast. You could try that too if you like.-

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mx

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CD if you can boot from it. Otherwise you may have to use plop or maybe some grub floppy or netinstaller floppy to get going.

Those old cd drives don't like cd-rw and they have to have best quality cd and burned at slowest speeds.

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I’m going to go with it I think tried the live install on my main machine and liked it. Testing it on a slightly newer celadon based compaq presario. (2002)? And it booted it up. My cds at home are only CD-R

Antix is a great choice!

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I installed it today and it works quite well! The kernel module is so old for networking it is simply eth100. I found this quite amusing, and the os idles around 70mb of RAM which is perfect for me!

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Congrads-

Thanks for the update.

Don't forget to mark your thread solved.

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