Best distro for an ancient pc?

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..:neutral: )
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

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

lol

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

any ideas though?

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)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rossi46

lol

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

any ideas though?

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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

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.

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

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

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):

Code:

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fdisk -l

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give you?

Bryan

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!