I'm grateful for the feedback and the stories each of you are sharing!

The larger hard drive is now a moot point. I long ago forgot that the key point was making the first 1024 cylinders available and from there the kernel will do fine with the remainder of the disk. I have larger spare drives that would provide sufficient swap space to overcome the meager 16 MB of RAM. With that perspective, installing Slackware or any distro is feasible ---running the system is another issue.

I'm wondering, however, what other's experience might be with running the 16MB in a dumb terminal (LTSP) rather than stand-alone machine. No hard drive necessary. Perhaps some of the previous answers were written within that perspective and I misread them. Would 16 MB be sufficient for a dumb terminal and basic window manager?

I might look for an older version of Slackware and install. PV keeps previous versions patched for many years, therefore security is no issue. I think PV moved from Xfree to Xorg in version 10.0, therefore 9.1 would be the last release with Xfree.

I noticed one of the suggestions was to use Fluxbox or Blackbox as a window manager - pff, I suggest Ion3.

If you really want a graphical desktop and the video card is too old for Xorg, I'll re-iterate the recommendation by others to try DeLi Linux: http://www.delilinux.org/

There's a XFree86 3.3.6 package available for DeLi: http://www.delilinux.org/forum/topic.php?id=140

I actually tried it on a 1992 vintage Packard Bell 486 with Video7/Headland graphics and it worked fine once I dusted off the brain cells that once knew how to hand-edit the XF86Config file.

This PC isn't really a 90 pound weakling so much as an Ichthyostega in a land of wolves...

A juke box? Perhaps, although at 6 MB a song, along with the OS, a 512 MB drive will only hold a few dozen songs. Perhaps the BIOS supports an old 3.2 GB hard drive sitting on my shelf, but I'm not holding my breath. This is a vintage 1991 BIOS.

If I were to use it as a juke box, I'd probably just set up the system with a command-line media player, then have it ssh into a nearby system with a big hard drive full of MP3s and just play in the background. This begs the question, "Why don't I just use the other system in the first place?," but that kind of thinking just isn't adventurous. :P

Slackware 11's probably about as modern a distribution as it can realistically handle, unless you want to prove how monstrously insane you are by compiling a heavily tweaked, low-overhead Gentoo install and have a month or so to spend doing it.

If you must run X11, twm's probably your only safe bet.

I find icewm-lite consumes a hair less RAM than twm, and it's far more usable. Even full icewm consumes less ram than fluxbox (depending on what theme you use).

See SliTaz

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/...tifully_marked

It can be helpful.