I have a very old beige box running Windows 95. Well, I suppose I should say it WAS running windows 95 until a whole bunch of dust caused the hard drive to format itself. At least that's what I'll say because when I opened the case and used a swiffer dust thing, it seemed to fix the problem. However, I have no OS installed, and the Win95 CD I have claims that it is too large to fit on my partition. I don't have much space. At the moment, I'm not sure exactly how much, but it's somewhere around 2 gigs. Since I'd rather have windows on my home computer, I figured I'd install linux on my personal computer. The problem is, I have no idea where to start finding a build that is suitable. I have a copy of Redhat 7, but when I try to install it, it says that I don't have enough ram (I have somewhere in the ballpark of 16k of ram). Do any of you know of a good FREE build of linux that will get the job done? I suppose it's important to say that it should fit on a floppy disk or two, I'm between CD-burners.

There are some floppy-sized Linux distributions here. I haven't used any of them, so can't recommend any one in particular. I suspect that most of them will be somewhat crippled as compared to most full modern distributions. If not having access to a CD burner were not a factor, would you consider other distributions? If so, you may want to consider dropping a few dollars on a CD. Cheapbytes sells most popular distributions for under $10. This will greatly increase your options, and you will probably be happier in the long run with a "full" distribution as compared to one of the floppy-sized ones. That being said - for a computer of Win95 vintage, I would recommend Debian, BSD (pick your flavor - FreeBSD or NetBSD, nudge wink), SuSE, or Mandrake. Other people will have other recomendations but these are a good place to start. When installing, bear in mind that many of these distributions (especially SuSE and Mandrake) assume modern hardware for their default "full" installations". You will get much better results on your older hardware if you select a less demanding subset of the default installation packages.

I'd recomend giving a HD install or Damn Small Linux a try. have a read through there forums http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

I would not recommend SuSE or Mandiva (Mandrake) due to your limited hardware. Debian, Slackware, DSL or Peanut may be good choices....I'm a Slackware fan myself and it will install on machines with only 4Mb RAM. BSD is also another option if you don't want to go down the linux route. You can try a net install of debian which you can initiate with a floppy and download only the packages required.

not that i can see why anyone wants to go the BSD route :) plus BSD is not a good idea for a newbie

"...not that i can see why anyone wants to go the BSD route..." I'd like to see you post that on the unix forum! ;) I haven't tried BSD for some time now, although when I have it may not have had all the bells and whistles some linux distros but it was certainly stable and pretty quick. I can't say what it is like for a newbie now either....I remember slackware being a bit of a bitch for a beginner but that has improved dramastically in later releases. BSD ports would also make installing/upgrading software relatively simple....

I second Damn Small Linux, although you might also try Puppy. I think you'll get more support on the DSL forums from experts on reviving older machines with the distro, and I actually found it to be quite newbie-friendly. The window manager is fluxbox, so you'll have to get used to right-clicking instead of wondering where the start menu is, but the hardware detection makes up for that. ;) Anyway, run it from CD for awhile. You don't have anything to lose. You'll probably need to download the boot floppy too, but it's fairly easy to find over there. At 49 megs, you shouldn't have any trouble getting the free .iso if you have dial-up, even without a download manager, but I do recommend doing it overnight. 2 gigs is a generous hard drive, but you might want to keep an eye out for some more RAM on eBay and the swap board at the DSL forums. Dim4550: Slackware P4 2.40GhZ, 1GB RAM, 120GB HD PresarioS5000NX: Dam Small Linux, Celeron,384MB RAM,40GB HD DimV400: Kubuntu PII 400Mhz, 256 MB RAM, 8GB HD Gateway P166: W