my name is the same as my nick....iam far away from most of u in india...
i started using linux two months back.(this is my first post)......
I heard that withlinux you can make good use of old h\w
now the question: I have a P2 400mhz runningf on win 98...... i want to install a
version of linux(any distro temme the version & FTP site) that runs as quickly( (X shud run as)as win 98 does and i shudnt have to wait for too long it load..
Xpecting lots of replies.........

Any distro will work on that machine, its not that old.

I suggest you browse the forums a little as this question has been asked many many times before and you'll find tons of useful information.

Slackware Linux ( www.slackware.com )loads very fast, waaay faster than ME, probably faster than your 98. In Slack I can get to a command line in <1 min., add ~15 sec. to that for X, add another ~30 sec. for KDE. Not sure how fast other distrobutions will be. To speed things up, you shouldn't use fancy stuff like KDE or GNOME, use the simpler, smaller & faster window managers like IceWM, fluxbox...& so on (for some reason I like fvwm2). I use a 750 Duron w/ 64mb ram... Ram will make a big difference, I think the speed depends more on the ram than the cpu, since most of the slowness is associated with the hard drive being accesed alot. Check out www.distrowatch.com for descriptions of the various distros.

ram is 128mb__ i guess it shud be fast........u mean any release of slackware shud be fast ...or do i need to get the ollder versions...?
after download is directly burning to the cd enuf--- or do i have to do something else i mean will the cd be bootable or will i have to get a bootdisk?
what does ISO installatioon image mean??
then i have questions about window mangers.........isnt sawfish a window
manager...u mean when the X doesnt have the menu only the left mouse button works??? if thats it ... i tried it a month back ...when i dint know much.....i reinstalled to get back KDE ... as i cud nver get back to kde ...

I just installed Slackware 9.1 on the a P133 with 64 Megs of ram on the weekend (to make a cheap as in FREE gateway for a cablemodem network) and it works pretty good (I ran KDE and Gnome...which were slow, but useable...if I switch to blackbox, there's no problems at all)

So the new version should be just fine.

I mainly use older hardware and I don't mind it at all. I am typing this on my decent IBM Thinkpad 600E, a 366MHz model, and it runs perfectly with Fluxbox (a Blackbox fork). I don't use KDE or Gnome since both are too slow and bloated in my opinion. That's a pretty important bit - people load KDE on an old machine and complain about Linux being slow, when it's basically their choice of desktop that makes the computer appear slow.

You'll find a screenshot of my current desktop at http://www.dsv.su.se/~hakan-vi/img/s...n_20031008.jpg if you would like to see what Fluxbox can look like. It's very configurable and there are loads of themes avaialable for it.

Håkan

My system is P2 350 MHZ , 256 MB SDRAM PC100 and running with de latest red hat 9.0 with gnome and kde and without any speedup tunning.
In speed all goes like with windows 98 more or less.
I think if i where using a lighter desktop i would get more speed and decrease system load but i have two brothers that i want to get impressed and move out that waste of hd called windows

All the cdrom ISOs you download are images of the discs, when you burn it you get a perfect copy of the original and nothing more it's needed to do, only boot the machine with the cd1 (bootable cdrom) in the cdr drive (configure this in the bios if it's not active) and go throught the install process.
It's a good idea to check the images with md5sum (search for a windows utility) before burning it.

Well my day to day machine in my trusty laptop...windows free, running mandrake 9.1 like a dream (I even watch DVDs on it regularily). Its a PII333 with 192Megs of ram.

I love to see people post about how they enjoy linux on older machines...It really burns me up to see some guy whining about how SLOW linux (or KDE or Gnome etc.) is on his P6 5Ghz with 4 Gig o' ram (or whatever....I know there is no P6..I'm exagerating to make a point). I mean really...

Shakeeb, keep at it and good luck...you have a good machine for the OS and it will be rewarding once you have it up and running.