What OS to use on an old PC?

[DukeP]

I need to install something on a pentium 200mhz with prob 1-2gb of HD and 32mb ram - and a matrox mystique.

What OS should I go for? I think it originally ran win98.
I was thinking some sort of linux, but the distributions I usually try out, is quite cpu and memory hungry.

Any ideas??

~~DukeP~~

[TnT]

VectorLinux is a distro made to run on lower end systems. I installed it on a P100 laptop with 40 MB of RAM. You can then run a lightweight WM like Blackbox or Fluxbox. Although they are light weight they are still full featured, I know plenty of people who use them on higher powered machines.

[DukeP]

Thank You!

Ill just download it.

Actually its for my little sister to use - it needs to be somewhat friendly for everyday use - but it only needs to do webbrowsing, emailing and letterwriting. I have to get it to print on a minolta laserprinter tho.

~~DukeP~~

[saxonww]

I have a Pentium 233 MMX laptop with similar specs although more ram (96MB). I use FreeBSD 5.1 on it without difficulty for web browsing, etc. but only because I need cardbus support - FreeBSD 4.9 will work correctly also for a desktop machine.

The laptop is not a speed demon but it does work.

FreeBSD doesn't have graphical polished installation tools or anything like that, but it's worth a look.

[SpiralDragon]

ahhh..... to bad BE inc whent out of business..... but it would have done the trick ithink

[GNEP]

I have a P133 laptop and it runs Win 95 quite happily thankyou.

[TnT]

Hmm... blackbox and fluxbox might not be the answer if its not a computer user who likes to tweak.