Hi, I have an old IBM PC which was made some time in 1995. It has a Pentium 75MHz CPU, 8MD EDO RAM, 428MB HDD & 3.5" FDD. I'm interested in installing a fast, small and friendly linux distro on it. I have considered BasicLinux because it is just SO SMALL! (You can look on the website at http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/baslinux/.) Can anyone give me any tips on installing, using and basically messing about with Linux? I'm a "N00B" (as you would say), but I know a little... Jalien

heck i would suggest bumping up the memory but the rest is fine for debian..... i would stay away from kde or gnome hollar if ya need help....

look at peanut linux

The distro you found is Slackware based, which is good for slow hardware, but you really should get more RAM. As far as I know XFree86 requires at least 8Mb of RAM but won't run well on less than 16Mb. Tiny-X looks like a good alternative, but I've never tried it, so I don't know if it's newbie-friendly. If you really want a crazy configuration, dual boot that Athlon 1800+ with Linux and use the IBM as a terminal. The beauty of X is you can have all your stuff running on the fast computer and displaying as if it were running on the slow one. You could even export some hard drive space with NFS. Better yet, play with Linux on the Athlon 1800+, then when you know what Linux can do, figure out what you want to do with the IBM. I have an IBM 166MHz with 48Mb RAM that's very good as a firewall/router. It's running OpenBSD, but it could do the same stuff in Linux. I also have a Celeron 400 running FreeBSD that functions as a file server. It runs Samba, a free implementation of the Windows SMB filesharing protocol. The only reason I need such a "fast" CPU for the fileserver is software RAID.

I can easily get another 8MB RAM (my Dad's got a big bag full of 'em!), and I will be using IceWM probably because it is available for the BasicLinux distro. Peanut Linux is a little too big for my hard drive. Also, I want to build it up from small components, i.e. EXACTLY what I want. After I've got it up and running with some sort of small Linux distro (either Debian, BasicLinux or something small like it), I plan on adding an old Ethernet card - something like the 3com 3C509 series - and then hooking it up to my home network (512kbps web, file server and windows machines). I will try to get SAMBA working too, it sounds great. Finally, I might see how good it is at running something like OpenOffice.org... Thanks for all your help, Jalien

I'm afraid OpenOffice won't quite make the cut.

sb73542: what else do you recommend as an office suite? Cheers, Jalien