Linux which distro for old system?

Hi people.

The place where I am doing my work experience has just had a huge computer systems upgrade. this meant that they were selling the best ones and throwing to old ones into a skip!

The QA Manager (Quality Assurance) agreed to let me pick one for myself. i of course trawled through them all looking for the best one. All of the computers are very outdated by todays standards, the best one I could find was based on an AMD K6-2 500MHz . at first it only had 24MB of RAM in it but I sneekily took to 64MB modules from two of the broken ones. So it now has 155MB of RAM. I booted it up and installed XP and it ran fine. But seeing as i already have an XP computer, a much better XP computer, so I have decided to try Linux.

So basically I need some help choosing a distro that will run well on this PC as well as look aestetically pleasing but also relatively easy to install. I have a bit of experience in installing linux as I helped my friend install RedHat onto a computer of his which we found fairly easy and troube free.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks

Tenbroya

 

Any modern distro, like Slackware or Debian will run on it, but you will have to specify when you install that you don't want it to install GNOME or KDE, because these are very resource demanding. Look into a GUI like Fluxbox or Enlightment.

 

You should be able to get away with KDE/Gnome on a 500Mhz with 155MB, but will probably have to switch off some things like transparency, so most distros will slide right in with a few tweaks.

 

Cheers Everyone, I'll try slackware and Debian and see which one I like best.

Tenbroya

 

I would try Vector Linux, it is based off of Slackware, but is optimized for older hardware, and runs fast on newer PCs.

L J

 

I use Debian and Xfce for my older machines. Easy and simple to get installed and running. I use Fluxbox for much older systems.

apt-get install x-window-system xfce4 mozilla-firefox

can't get any easier...

 

I can run KDE or gnome on a p2-3 celeron somewhere in the 400s. I havent been able to get a clockspeed down I want to say 64mb of ram, but I could be wron there. just the only problem I had with red hat was it had me format using the ext3 filesystem. Instead I used a gentoo-based system recovery disk and formated it... dont remember what it is now

 

i'd say go for slackware!

 

Ubuntu runs very well on my Pentium 2 300mhz box with 128mb ram, Its really easy to install, I'd give it a go.

 

I run slackware 9.0 with gnome on my p3 560 with 256mb, runs fine.

- serial_

 

I run Gentoo Linux with fluxbox on my 200Mhz laptop (got the laptop for $10!). it runs a tad slower than I would like, but I can do a fair amount on it.