my mum has an old gateway machine she uses to write on, which currently has windows 95 installed. she wants to go on the internet with it so she can send email and look at the weather forecast, etc. etc. but ive not got a lot of trust in the security of win 95 on the net, so i was wondering what the best linux alternative is that i could offer her. she's only got a 2.4 gig hard drive, a pentium 166 mmx and 32 megs of ram, so that counts out all the big distros, but a nice user interface is essential because she's hopeless with computers and would panic if confronted with a command line. also one that required a minimum of complex setting up would be nice since im a linux newbie myself :) thanks in advance for any help!

I have heard good things about mempis although I haven't tried it myself. Slackware and debian would also be suitable for that hardware. Don't run KDE or Gnome but go for a lightweight window manager like xfce.

try vectorlinux. http://www.vectorlinux.com version 4.0 would be good. or upgrade the ram (ram for those things is dirt cheap on ebay)to 64 and install version 4.3 or 5.1

thanks for the suggestions, i'll look into them. i installed xfce on my own machine to test it out. very impressed but how do i get it to start up automatically when i type startx? at the moment, i'm just getting kde still.

Have a look for an xinitrc for xfce. On my slackware systems the rc files are kept in /etc/X11/xinit and named like xinitrc.kde, xinitrc.gnome, xinitrc.xfce etc. Just copy the one you want to ~/.xinitrc and away you go. You can also use switchdesk if you have it installed. Another way is to launch a graphical login like kdm or gdm, select xfce and say yes to make it your default. Lastly you can edit your ~/.xinitrc by hand. As with most things in GNU/Linux, there are several ways to accomplish the same thing!

thanks 3dave, i went with the graphical method since my tinkering with xinitrc's didnt seem to have much effect. its worked and thats a relief cos kde seems hellbent on making itself start no matter what. gdm managed to tame it ;) anyway thanks for all the help!