how bad will mandrake 8.1 perform on a pentium 233 mmx with 64mb ram? i will be needing the gui to make my transition from windows easier. i have installed other linux distro's before (rh 5.2 on a 486dx4-100/32mb ram) but i removed them because i don't know what else to do after moving around folders and editing text.

it should be ok, but instensive window managers like gnome and kde will kill the system completely. if you use blackbox or such like, you should be ok. you should also try and customize the system to remove as much unwanted processes loading on boot as possible. Mandrake in particular laods a lot of services that you probably won't want

That's almost exactly the setup I'm using here as my router and firewall, except that I have 80 MB of RAM (64 + 16) in it. I've had no problem using KDE except that it seems to take forever to load, but have found that both blackbox and kfce are much more responsive. Unfortunately they don't have the total Win98 workalike that you need. I've heard good things about qvwm but haven't yet downloaded it to try; it's supposed to be an almost total clone of the Win98 GUI, which makes the transition easy. The great thing about Linux, of course, is that you can start out with something of this sort, and then replace it later with something simpler like kfce, without losing any data! Not to mention that it frees you from the continual MS upgrade ratrace (which I prefer to call downgrading, based on what's happened to their products over the last couple of years)...

Be sure to turn off all the services that you don't use; the Mandrake Control Center and its "services" utility makes this quite easy. That will go a long way toward curing the "bloat" characteristic that many folk accuse Mandrake of having! They seem to err on the side of including too much rather than not enough. The first time I installed, I tried to install everything. Took well over an hour and just about filled a 20-GB drive! Then I reformatted, reinstalled, and selected only a minimum set of features...

Just wanted to add that Mandy 8.1 runs satisfactorily on my puny P166 (well, a Cyrix 6x86 166 ... but same diff, here) with only 32MB RAM. I can run KDE, slow loading, but it will work. Blackbox keeps everything humming quite nicely, so I'd day go with that.

Tha_newbfather

I definitely like blackbox best of the ones I've tried, but bundat said he really needs the Win-like GUI in order to work, and I've not yet figured out how to populate the blackbox desktop with icons. It's fairly easy with KDE of course, and I understand that qvwm is even easier. Once he's comfortable with Linux it won't be such a problem to switch to a peppier window manager!

i have posted on other forums and it seems like this setup will really be slow, huh? i am currently using the same computer with windows 2k pro and it's not slow, i basically use it for web browsing and word processing. what about having a 32mb s3 savage4 vidcard? will that help? or what about installing rh 5.2 instead? thanks for alll the replies.

no, it won't be slow, as long as you don't expect it to do anything beyond the scope of a p233. just bear in mind that mandrke is aimed at high end computers generally, and due to it's default set up, systems below say, 600Mhz won't perform as well as they would do with a lower level distro like slackware.