Hi everyone i'm gonna try and put mandrake linux on my old comp. right now its got 16MB memory a 133Mhz processer. its an IBM Aptiva A40. its got the hard drive space it needs. mandrake says it needs 64M memory so im gonna get two 32M EDO rams to add to the 16 its got. my question is. will it be fast enough to use for internet, word processing, etc. not being used for games, just stuff like spreadsheets and junk. anyway. its got win95 on it is it gonna run faster once i get mandrake on it or will it run slower?

i have an aptiva m71, which has a pentium 133mhz, and originally had 32mb of ram. i upgraded it to 96 mb of ram and attempted to install mandrake 7.2, it failed miserably. slackware and redhat also failed to install. i was however able to install caldera linux on it. it runs fine for me.

i have slackware 9.0 running on a 300mnz with 64mb and i find that when running Xfree86 with KDE 3.1 it is pretty sluggish. but without the gui it runs fine for me.

I have a PackardBell 133Mhz which I use to run an IRC server. I have slack 9.0 on it X windows is slower than molases on it and surfing the internet using mozilla is more painstaking than driving behind an old lady. But it does work. Mandrake will not work on that system. It's i686 optimized that means it's been written for processors above 600 Mhz. You won't be able to use a friendly linux distro on that system (ie: Mandrake, Redhat, SuSE) try slackware or a BSD or caldera like BS said. There are probably some other distros out there anyone else have any suggestions?

uh oh that could be bad. i need a relatively friendly distro cuz i need to be able to do word processing and stuff. plus the rest of my family (not very computer knowledgeable) needs to be able to at least use it for that.

how about these....

http://www.xandros.com/systemreq.html

i checked out slackware is there any chance of running a 'decent' (and by that i mean usable) GUI on slackware?

and what about if i got slack 8.1 instead of the new version. would that help speed it up a bit?

If you are looking for something user-friendly and for the family you could plan on installing windows instead of linux ... :\

ok....i don't have the windows 95 cd anymore that it came with and i don't want to have to pay for a new windows. plus i don't think that computer would run a new version of windows ver well.

Redhat or Mandrake are about the two user-friendliest distro's out there. Slack is NOT what you are looking for.

ok....i was told that redhat and madrake will not run on my 133 mhz soon to be 80MB ram 2gb hard drive piece of [censored] computer. lol. so would someone please clear this up on what will run and what will not!

slackware is startin to annoy me...
i've tried bare.i old_cd.i scsi.i (even though i am pretty sure it is NOT scsi because i can't see an adapter on it........and also the fact that both ide channels are being used and the only things i got is hdd cdrom and floppy.) all it will do is say

loading: vmlinuz.... then all of a sudden it just says 'boot failed: please change disks and press any key to continue'

AAAAAARGGHH this is pissin me off. why won't it even load the kernel from the frickin disk! and i also tried ramdisk hdd=cdrom for all of the images. please help!

i found caldera to be very user friendly and easy to install.

MESELF, i got the same problem once. You have to rawrite install.1, install.2, install.3 on different floppys .. the informations on the website seem to be wrong.

no......this does not regard install.1 .2 etc. this involves the "BOOT" not "ROOT" disk. i am having the problem when i have bare.i in the floppy drive.