which distro for 7yr old dell

[jnev]

i'm getting a dell i3500 (bought in 199 that has win98 on it. i plan on wiping the hard drive clean and installing linux only, no dual-boot. the specs of it are 625mhz p3, 96mb ram, 6gb hd. i'm thinking the lack of ram will create problems, am i right? what distro would be good for it? would something like mepis or kanotix run on it? i'm not really into compiling kernels from scratch so stuff like damnsmall or gentoo are out.

thanks

[bernstine]

Try DSL, I have only 32mb ram and no swap and it runs well. My comp is from 97. I understand.

[U-Turn]

i'm not really into compiling kernels from scratch so stuff like damnsmall or gentoo are out.

Why should you need to compile a kernel in order to use DamnSmall?
To answer your question, any distro would be a workable choice. The RAM might be an issue for Mandrake, Fedora and SUSE but I'm not certain about that.
Give Slackware or one of the Slack based distros a look. I currently run Slack 10.1 with Dropline GNOME on one machine and MiniSlack0.4 on another. I think MiniSlack is going to take over on the first machine as well because I'm really starting to enjoy XFCE4.
Both machines are a few years old and run quite well.

[jnev]

my bad on the damnsmall, i actually just installed it a few hours ago. it's been working fine, much better than the win98 previously installed on it.

one other question: what are some good wifi cards that are supported by linux?


thanks

[U-Turn]

WiFi is getting easier almost daily. Here's a couple of links that should help you decide.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/
http://www.fuw.edu.pl/~pliszka/hints/wireless.html
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/
http://www.wi-fitechnology.com/viewthread18.html