I was recently given a old desktop it has 24 megs of ram a 1 gig hd (which I am going to upgrade to 10) I don’t know what the processor speed is. My problem is the computer is completely broken it turns on but it has a graphic card and that doesn’t work so I don't get anything onscreen and so I don't know what all it has I want to install Linux but don't know what version to get or where to get it. It has to be on a floppy and be able to make the graphic card work. Does anyone know where I can download freeware linuxlike this. The void will take us all.........

First, upgrading the RAM would help far more than getting a new hard drive. Second, where does the graphics card fail? If it fails when the OS starts, Linux might work. If you don't even see the BIOS stuff, there's little hope. There are two schools of thought when it comes to running Linux on old systems. One is to use an old distribution from the same era as the hardware, and the other is to use the latest and greatest, but to pick a distro that lets you customize enough that you get a relatively lightweight environment. The oldest Linux distro I've ever used was released in 1998. I remember having to enter an IRQ and IO range to get the sound card working like back in the DOS days. My NIC wasn't supported. If it had been, it would still have been a pain to configure. Best of all, if I provided incorrect information about my monitor, the primitive version of XFree86 could have blown it up. For the above reasons, I recommend a tweaked modern distro. If you can get at least 64Mb (if you get 128Mb, we can start considering Mozilla FireFox and other convenient apps) of RAM, I wouldn't even consider an old distro. Installation won't be difficult if you have either a spare CD-ROM drive or a broadband Internet connection. I think in your situation, I wouldn't install Linux at all. I'd install FreeBSD version 4.11. FreeBSD is a UNIX-like OS of slightly different heritage. Most basic principles are the same, and most open source software runs on both OSs. You could create two boot disks, boot from them, then the isntaller would download everything over the Internet as it's needed. When you get done, the installer would ask you if you want to install additional packages, at which point you select a lightweight window manager like OpenBox and a lightweight web browser like dillo. You'll have a powerful UNIX command line environment and a usable GUI web browser. Also, the documentation at freebsd.org is better than most Linux documentation.

The graphic card never even brings up anything its like the moniter isnt receving a signal. But I'll mess around with that and hopefully I can get it to work. Can you give me a link to dl the open sourse software? The RAM is maxed out well I think I can put another 8 mb but then the mother board will be full so not much hope of getting it up to 64. It had win 95 plus on it befor I thin kthe guy said if thats any help.

If you don't see anything, you'll have to replace that graphics card unless you're really hardcore and want to install over a serial terminal. I'm not even sure I could pull of something like that. Not on standard PC hardware anyway. As for your RAM situation, I'd replace the old chips. With an old system, you probably need SIMMs. You can Google for more information or compare with your XP machine's RAM. I found 4 32Mb chips going for $15 on eBay. With 128Mb you'd have a sluggish but usable desktop. Your current 24Mb is barely past command line only territory. I mentioned that I liked FreeBSD because of the documentation. Here it is. Remember that you want version 4.11. The 4 series is modern (good hardware support, no exploding monitors) without being too much of a hog on old hardware. When you get it installed, you can always run the installer (/stand/sysinstall command) to configure things and add software while you learn all the UNIX commands. I see the docs even cover XFCE, an ideal desktop environment if you had 128Mb of RAM. You'll also be able to run Mozilla Firefox. If you can't get that much, the 'echo "/usr/X11R6/bin/startxfce4" > ~/.xinitrc' command is still what you want to do, except substitute "startxfce4" for "fluxbox" after you've installed fluxbox. That, and use the kinda ghetto dillo web browser unless you can put up with Firefox being painfully slow.

NB some older motherboards didn't like hard drives > 8Gb....check for compatibilty first, and a BIOS update if you can get one.

"Your current 24Mb is barely past command line only territory." heh i'm runng slackware 10 on a 133 with icewm on 32mb of ram. and it works great. i have had a fully working (a usably fast)X desktop on 8mb ram. if you can get 32mb try vectorlinux (either 4.0 or 4.3). but i would say you will need a new graphics card.