Hi... I have got an old Packard Bell (120 Mhz with 80 MB ram.) I am actually not a linux geek but if you know, please tell me what distro can run well on this PC. I know this shouldn't be a decent linux experience but all I need is a GUI (preferably a good looking one), open office and firefox. Waiting for your responses. Joseph Daniel

You could probably try any of the distros that have a "live" CD. At least this'll tell you whether or not your machine's specs are enough. Keep in mind that a "live" CD distro will run slower than an installed distro. Give Ubuntu (Breezy Badger) a try. Please let us know if you found someone's advice to be helpful.

Actually, I had tried Ubuntu 5.1 just the previous release... but I discovered that my PC doesn't have boot from cd support... Is there any way to overcome this?

The 2 important things are RAM memory and the size of your hard disk. I think that the running Ubuntu (Breezy Badger) might require more RAM than you have. What do you mean by "a GUI"? There are some small,light distros which will give you a GUI of sorts - but nothing like KDE or Gnome - DSL (Damn Small Linux), Feather Linux, Puppy Linux etc. You might try Beatrix(a live CD), based on Ubuntu Warty, which will give you Gnome. The blurb says it will run on 64 Mb of Ram, but it prefers 128Mb. But it will need a hard disk of about 1Gb. It runs OpenOffice 1.1 out of the box but presumably this can be updated by package managers. Are you absolutely sure that the PC will not boot from the CD? Have you accessed the BIOS and checked this? The alternative is to make a boot floppy. This will start booting on the floppy and then transfer to the CD. This can be made either under DOS or under Linux. Under Linux look for "Rawrite" which is the programme to make a disk and "Bootfloppy.iso" (or similar) to make the floppy image.

vectorlinux.com

Yes I checked it for boot from cd capabitily but it seems it has no BIOS support for that. I will try that floppy install option and report back... thanks a lot Joseph