Ok so i garbaged picked a PC for my friend. He's a complete newbie, but needs a pc. He's used to Winblows, but he'll manage. The box i got is running Winblows 98 and has a pentium II processor and the rest of it is chintzy and clueless to me. What Small/Fast distro do you recommend? I was thinkin Puppy, Vector, DSL (im a little weary on DSL), and MINIX, which i heard is REAL tiny and basic. Suggestions?

Put vista on it

www.google.com

Can you give us any specs on ram? hd space? Clock speed? mobo serial?

Most linux distros don't require that much. If you want something light, try Fluxbuntu, or another fluxbox-based distro (most ram is used on shiny things, and if the box is as shitty as I'm assuming, no shiny things can be allowed).

However, if it can run XP, it can probably run any linux with a moderate amount of shiny things.

Unfortunately no,

It cant run XP....i didnt say that...but that is the funniest observation on RAM i've ever heard about!

Put Fluxbuntu on it and it'll probably be fine, or really any distro with Fluxbox/blackbox. If you're concerned, you could do Gentoo, put fluxbox on that, and it'll probably be pretty good.

He could install any distro and go text mode only? kidding

Maybe Fedora running a minimal KDE with like everything off... or icewm o.o

I just installed Puppy CE(community edition) on my sister's old POS Presario 900 laptop. It comes preloaded with all kinds of software/drivers/browser plugins, and the full install is still under 400 megs.

It's damn fast. I was pretty surprised. You click, and get a response instantly. Even on this old hardware(Athlon +1700, 256mb SDRAM) it boots up in about 30-40 seconds. And I mean that from the time you push the power button until the time you are actually doing stuff. It only took about 10-15 minutes to do a Grub install. I like it a lot so far. In fact, I think Im going to install it to an external USB HDD.

As for Vector and DSL, I actually tried both of those distros on this laptop. Shitty hardware support for both of those, and more complex.

I don't have anything bad to say about it, other than a bunch of the programs are named "Puppy-Something", and there are recurring puppy images in some of the config gui's. If you don't hate puppies as much as me, then it shouldn't bother you.

Zenwalk