Alright, I'm sorta new to PCs as a whole (longtime Mac user, see) and I'm seeing about getting a Linux OS put on a slave HD in order to surf the web and the like with less concern for viruses and spyware than with Windows. (But I wanna keep Windows 95 for gaming purposes.)

Anyway, I'm using an Intel Celeron 333Mhz processor, which originally ran Windows 98 when I got it. (Though I switched back to 95, as it aggravates less...) Some linux OSes in particualr I'd like to try are SuSE and Mandrake. Which versions of these distros would run well enough on my computer? I'm guessing that the recent versions 9 and 10 I see everywhere are a bit too fast, though I can't seem to find a place that offers older ones. Any info would be greatly appreciated!

Both should work SuSE and Mandrake.

GUI will be slow but command line will work. If you wish GUI then go for fluxbox/blackbox or even xfce
they are good for old h/w

any distro will work ,xfce is a very good GUI, fast and uses les resources, only thing is the X might be a bit slow. How much RAM u have?

Try vector Linux. It is a less fat linux then other distros and it is build for speed.
www.vectorlinux.com. It is based on slackware.
I have experience with redhat, gentoo and suse and it seems that the newest version of these distros is getting slower and slower. It has probably got to do with that these distros get obese like windows.

I suggest Gentoo Linux with ICEWM or any window manager do have a more responsive GUI.

I would suggest slackware, with blackbox for a wm, or if you *need* a windows-like environment, gnome.

How much ram do you have? If you have less than 512, adding ram would be a *Very* big improvment to your computing happiness, for not much money.

Gentoo would take quite a while to compile, wouldn't it?

Yeah, I'm not too hell-bent on having it look like Windows. I'm actually most accustomed to MacOS X, and I've used it's Unix-like Terminal program some, so I'm not totally foreign to CLI. ('sides, only reason I even keep Windows is to play a few games I have for it...)

I'm thinking about Vector Linux, but for some reason the rootdisk.img I downloaded is 11K too large to fit on a blank floppy disk. On my iMac, the floppy disk capacity is said to be 1.3 MB, but on my windows machine it comes up as 1.4 or so. Thing is, my PC is not hooked up to my LAN, so I can't put it on the floppy from my PC until I get an ethernet cable or some such...

Arrgh. Why must the technology world thwart me so?

EDIT: do all Linuxes need a floppy disk to boot from, like Windows? Or do some just need an iso burned to a CD? Aside from Vector, I'm also thinking of SuSE, or Mandrake or somesuch (though I'll probably end up trying lots of them before all is said and done.)

EDIT EDIT: I have a SuSE iso, actually, but it's 700 MB, and my "700MB" discs are actually only 660 MB. Is there a way I can split the SuSE .iso into two smaller parts and install from two CD ROMs?

mst,

Vector should have a fairly small bootable ISO available. Don't bother with the floppies unless your system can't boot from CD.

--Shade

Get larger discs. You can't split the file. Or, get a net-install iso (small)

If you want speed on old hardware, I'd stay away from SUSE or Mandrake, as they are the most resource-intensive distros. Also, correct me if I am wrong, but the whole point of these distros is the GUI. Get debian or slackware instead. Gentoo will be too slow, because of compiles. I use debian on a 233mhz pentium with 80mb ram. How much memory do you have? Less than 64mb is probably not enough for any type of graphics. 64mb should be fine for some window managers. Forget KDE and Gnome. Do not get an old version of a distro. You will regret it, because of the old software and lack of support. You will not be able to install new versions of programs, because they will depend on new libraries.

Aah. I've burned the iso, but I'm not sure what's wrong. when I tell the comp to boot from the CDROM, it says "no bootable media." Then proceeds to boot Windows 95.

Might I have burned it wrong? I just dragged the .iso onto the disc in the Finder in OS X... is there some other particular method I should be using?

But it will avoid lots of frustation in front of an unusable computer

This is wrong. When you insert the cd, do you see a single file on it named <something>.iso? If so, you wrote the image on a cd, you did not create a cd with it. You must select an option in your burning program that says something like 'make disc from image', then give it the iso. You could also use the cdrecord program.

Awesome. I now has me a bootable Vector Linux CD ROM.

Thanks much for the tips all! I will undoubtedly need further assiance in the future, but... I shall relish in this victory while it lasts!!