Hey all, My History: I've installed Mandrake a few times, but I've always done it the easy way. I tried to run a full install of Mandrake on an old 233Mhz Toshiba, and it was very, very slow. I ditched and went back to Win98 and put GuildFTPd on it. Works great. But I want to learn Linux!!! I now have an opportunity to install on an old 200Mhz laptop (another Toshiba) - and I want this thing to boogey. I know X won't work, so I'm willing to go commando on the command line. I'd like to at least use it as an FTP server, and a general system for learning linux from the command line (that's where all the **power** is anyhoo, right?). Would the Mandrake 8.2 minimal install be a good option? What's included in that 65MB install? Will it be tough (for a newbie) to add a server to that minimal install? Should I use a different distro? Just curious what the forum gurus here may have to say. Thanks so much for this forum! T.

I'd say to do minimal install, don't pick anything to install, except internet/networking section (Or something along those lines...) Then you'll have all the internet/FTP related stuff installed, and not much else.

I am actually running Mandrake 6.0 on a 166 fully installed with 64 megs of ram just find. I installed 8.1 but went back to 6.0 and recompiled the kernal. 6.0 was noticeably faster. Make sure that the memory hole is not enabled in the bios.

you might get more bang for your with another smaller distribution rather than go for the minimal install from a large one. i know BasicLinux does ftp server ( as extra to base package), and it has little requirements for RAM and HD space. dont forget X needs 8MB RAM and up.