Maximum PC

I have an old laptop that had Windows 98 on it (I broke the os) so now I want to install Linux on it. It has 64mb and a 1.5gig hard drive. I will try any linux but dsl.

Thanks in advance
Ibrad

How about delilinux?

http://www.delilinux.org/

Thats look like a nice one. I also found vectorlinux light while looking for a distro. I have never installed linux before so we shall see how it goes in the morning. If I don't understand what I am doing I shall be back here is the morning

Is there some specific needs other then the utilize an old laptop?

My initial though is Gentoo or some flavor os BSD. Only reason I bring up the later is that it might be easier to locate legacy ISOs that would probably make a simpler time running on something like that.

Well, I want to use the laptop as my first step into Linux for I don't want to dual boot my current system. (Plus its taking up space doing nothing in my house)

I looked into Gentoo, it looked real nice but I thought it would not run on this old of a system. It said its possible if you take out the hard drive and run the setup on a more powerful machine but I don't want to dissemble the laptop.

How would BSD or Gentoo run on this old of a machine? I also saw the Slackware and Debian are good for old machines, is this true?

P.S The Laptop has no access to the internet so everything will be downloaded from my personal machine then moved via disk to the old machine.

I've used Debian for older machines, but nothing like that. My old iMac had 64mb RAM and it ran PPC build of Debian Sarge ok. It took some work though.

With more and more people getting into using Linux, *most* Linux distros are getting more and more user friendly. For the absolute n00b, even something like Debian will require some command line work for the essentials like Flash, Java , and "dirty" codecs like those for playing AVI and MP3 files. Then again, you're not doing anything like that on this machine.

I've never used BSD or Gentoo myself, but I've recently tried installing Slackware and it can be pretty complicated. I've used Debian quite a bit and it's the most easiest. Too bad the latest edition of Ubuntu wouldn't run well on that thing or I'd say to use that.

I'm not sure that's necessary if you build from stage one.

On a side note,I think it's almost criminal that I have to sit here and say that a machine you have may not be good for linux, where I could easily say that it'd be fine 10 years ago. If someone had a archive of say Readhat 5.1 disks...but those archives are long gone (thus the BSD option)

I did find that Mandrake has some older ones still available though...

ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/mandrake/Mandrakelinux/old/

You might also want to give this a browse just for some ideas...

http://tuxmobil.org/

Would an old version of Ubuntu work? I see that the bare minimum requirements are 64mb if you use the alternate install cd.

Anyways I currently think my best choice would be delilinux. It looks like it could run on a 64mb system.

It's debian based...why not? If anything, I'd see if I Can find an older xubuntu. Just so things are clean, I don't see any reason why you couldn't just run a CLI on that machine. Getting a GUI going with it poses a whole different problem, so you'll be looking for something as lighteright as possible.

FWIW, I was poking over on distrowatch and ran across something on their site called Tiny core thats seemed to have generated a good amount of page hits...

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=tinycore

Thanks for that link. I could not find an old enough version of xubuntu to run. I saw that openSuse 8.2 could run on a 64mb machine but they don't have an iso. Debian says it can run on 64mb but I am wondering if it can fit on a 1.5 gig hard drive?

At one time, the only way to load SuSE from a disk was to pay for it. The free way was through a network install where you downloaded a setup Disk and then downloaded the RPMs. Kind of sucked if you were working with Dialup back then, but people did it. I don't remember what version that changed

That's why I also posted the link to Mandrake. The ver 7.2 I think is comparable to Suse 8.2 at that time.

Thanks everyone for you help. I have decided to go with delilinux and I am downloading it right now. I got my spare machine out and I am now waiting the 2 hours it going to take to download the ISO. Till it comes to setting up delilinux and learning Linux I want to thank everyone for the advice they gave.

Ibrad