Which Distro for an old PC?

[Hairyloon]

A have an old PC which is currently running Windows 98, and a friend who is in need of the internet.

What would be a good distro to use?
The only big ask is that it has bluetooth capability.

[devils casper]

Could you post the specs of your machine? There are a lot distros available for old machines. I would suggest you to check this Poll.
Bluetooth capabilities are available in most distros and in case it doesn't pre-installed, you can install package easily.

[Hairyloon]

Could you post the specs of your machine?

It was in part a generic question, as I have a few old machines, but the one on the table is an AMD Duron 1000MHz.
Not sure how much RAM, and I may have more in the spares bin, and such a small HD that I'm too embarrassed to say...
So little that Ubuntu couldn't even find it!

I would suggest you to check this Poll.

My instinct was for Puppy, and the majority seem to concur.
Thanks.

Bluetooth capabilities are available in most distros and in case it doesn't pre-installed, you can install package easily.

Easiest if it is built in since it is through Bluetooth that we are wanting to access t'internet.

[Hairyloon]

Tried puppy... failed to get bluetooth working, and ran out of HD space.
Am staring to wonder if Windows 98 might be the way... It was working on it OK before I started messing about.

[rokytnji]

I have a door stop ,P66hz ,12MB ram, ?KB Hardrive, Notebook that came with Windows 95. Short of running Blue Flops. All it is good for is running floppy games. Dial up modem via pcmcia slot. Ball mouse on deck with left and right click on side of Notebook Housing. Circa 199?. Color 16 bit screen. Everything works. It was given to me for helping a bro out on a motorcycle

Funny thing is. The Battery still holds a charge.

Maybe one of these days I'll put it on Ebay as a Antique.

Bluetooth on Puppy Search

You should be able to get wireless going in puppy with a wireless pcmcia card

D-Link WNA-1330 Wireless G Cardbus, Refurbished

The dlink card above comes with a atheros chip that works in all Linux distros I have thrown at it..

[Hairyloon]

Bluetooth on Puppy Search[/URL]

Yes, tried that. Kept falling over for one reason or another.
The obvious answer is to get a bigger hard drive, but I'm only in the area 'till tomorrow, so I haven't had time.
Funny thing though, when putting Win 98 back on it it said: "The hard drive is over 500MB Do you want to enable large drive support"... don't that just take you back!?

You should be able to get wireless going in puppy with a wireless pcmcia card

D-Link WNA-1330 Wireless G Cardbus, Refurbished[/url]

The dlink card above comes with a atheros chip that works in all Linux distros I have thrown at it..

Wireless isn't the problem: there is nothing there to connect it to.
The plan is to Bluetooth to the mobile phone, and dial out on that. Works fine on mine.

[Hairyloon]

Ok, so that mission is aborted for now... New project.
Pentium III laptop, all of 256MB RAM, but at least this time we are not struggling with drive space.

I have just installed Mint on a not so obsolete machine, and as I had the disk to hand, I tried that...
Disk ran OK, but when I pressed the "Install" button, it did nothing but spin the disc for a bit.

So I went back to Puppy. Which installed OK, but in the process of trying to install Bluetooth on it I have broken something.
All I get now is a blank X window.

I could obviously go back to square one and reinstall, but I would rather learn how to fix it, if anyone has any top tips or suggestions.

[devils casper]

Press Alt+Ctrl+F3. Does it switch to tty3 and drop at command line prompt?

[Hairyloon]

Press Alt+Ctrl+F3. Does it switch to tty3 and drop at command line prompt?

Err, what do you mean "drop"?
Yes, I can switch to tty3 and get a command prompt. I can also drop out of X with ctrl alt backspace.

[MASONTX]

AntiX has always been my go to distro for older computers, but legacyOS is also good. You can go to distrowatch.com and do a search for older computers for more suggestions.