I just got a old computer from a family member, its a old compaq with a riser board in it. Very old. Its a 333mhz p2, with 90mb ram. Hard drive is around 6gb. It already has mandrake 10 and XP on it, but both run very slowly. I was going to put Windows 2000, or NT 4 on it, but the thing is too slow to make any real good use out of it.

So I want to put some other distribution on it. What would run on it relatively well? I'd like something somewhat newbie/user friendly. I know a little bit, but not enough. I can't boot from CD rom, so it'll need a boot disk.

Thanks.

Feather Linux. It's got a boot disk too.

Anything with Fluxbox or XFCE or another lightweight windowmanager should be an option (even Mandrake).

One of the computers I manage has only 64 MB of RAM and can run Feather pretty well.

I'll look into that. I was thinking about Redhat 7.3, or 8.0. 8.0 doesn't need alot of resources, I think the minimal requirements were just under what I have.

Feather linux is a live CD, do they have a version that can be installed to the harddrive?

I got Debian running on a 350mhz w/ 128MB RAM using XFCE. Looks nice and is quite responsive.

There's a command in one of the menus that installs it to the hard drive.

What version of debian?

Oh ok, I'll give it a try. Thanks!

I had gentoo running on a Pentium 200 128MRam 9Gdisk untill I trashed the hard drive last night.
The install took a while (days) but it worked reasonably well for what it is.

I've tried gentoo before, I need something quick and simple to install.

I'm installing redhat 9, with a minimal amount of packages, and I'll see how that does, I'll probably just install a differnet windows manager. For now, I'll have gnome.

Good luck: I almost had Red Hat 9 working on my mother's computer (64 MB RAM).

A 90 MB RAM computer should do somewhat better.

It runs. It's not the fastest, but it works. It's alot faster than XP and mandrake. I'm sure with a lighter windows manager it will run better.

I have no idea about it's ability to be loaded without a bootable CD, but Damn Small Linux (DSL) is what my friend is using on a whole host of P166 machines with either 64 or 96 megs of RAM and 3 GB hard drives.

Vector Linux is also good on older hardware.