Best distro for an ancient pc?

[rossi46]

I've just cobbled together an old relic from bits I had lying around. Apart from a dvdrom/cdrw drive I just ordered 2nd hand from evilbay, this has cost me zero moneyto build.

The spec is:
Athlon 1600xp chip
128 mb ram (I have two 128mb sticks installed, but one of them is not working?)
Maxtor 30G hd
Geforce DDR Generic card 32mb
Jeantech 300W psu
2 (!) usb 1 slots (at the back.. )
P.Bell 15" vga monitor.

My questions are:
What would be the best distro to fully optimise performance from this lowly old sysytem?
Can I expect to play 3d games or is that asking too much from an old gfxcard?

I have Mandriva 2005 S.E. running on it currently and it's a tad slow tbh. I don't intend to put any windows os on it at all, and I'm not needing it to go online or anything. I'd like it to use it as a multimedia centre if possible.

cheers

Paul

[void_false]

U call it ancient PC!?!?!?!
Dont you occasionally owe some M$ shares?

[rossi46]

lol

ok, maybe not ancient, but certainly aged...

any ideas though?

[oz]

Some good lighterweight distros would include:

Zenwalk
Damn Small Linux
Arch (network install - if you only install the base and what you need)
Debian (network install - if you only install the base and what you need)

[winter]

lol

ok, maybe not ancient, but certainly aged...

any ideas though?

so an old fart then. suse will probably run hell even fedora would probably run on it. Although a lightweight distro is a good idea

[borromini]

If your RAM sticks don't seem to work - test in different banks and with different configurations (for example one stick at a time each time in a different bank). It could also be (but is very unprobable) your motherboard only supports 128 MB of RAM.

As for a distro - Gnome and KDE will not run very fluently on 128 MB RAM. I run Zenwalk with XFCE. The lighter distro's (or at least DE's or WM's) are the way to go if you want decent performance.

[rossi46]

Advice taken. I'm downloading Zenwalk as I type this.

Couple of things, though :

Do I have to d/l packages seperately or does the distro come with some?

Do I need the MD5 file also, if so what do I do with it once I have it?

Do I d/l XFCE seperately or does it come with the distro (what is it?)

**EDIT**

Im nearly finished d/l-ing the Zenwalk iso. Before I format and install on my other machine - will it run smoother and quicker than KDE? My other machine is running ok, burning cds and stuff.

**EDIT 2**

That's it formatting and installing now - LOL - I hope you weren't just pimping your favourite distro...

Thanks

Paul

[rossi46]

I like it.

My pc is flying. There doesn't seem to be very many apps with it, bit I need to learn to install 3rd party stuff anyway

One big question, though - where's my drive space went? The device manager only lists one partition of 5.6 Gig (of which I've used 1.3). It's a 30Gig hd, can I make the partition bigger 'in-house' if you will, or should I re-install and start again?

Paul

[bryansmith]

For packages, look into netpkg. borromini will be able to better explain it as he/she is the avid Zenwalk user here .

What does the output of (as root):

fdisk -l

give you?

Bryan

[oosterhouse]

You can download the pclinuxos livecd and login as root, then do the command 'diskdrake' to get to an easy partitioner that allows you to resize partitions. Hope that helps!