Which Linux for PII 400 mhz box?

[jakedakat]

I was wondering if anyone could suggest which flavor of linux would be best for a system witht the following specs?

PII 400 mhz
192 megs for Ram
30 gig + 75 gig drives

The main function of this box would be firewall/router and fileserver for my home network.
Right now I have RedHat 8.0 on it and it is very sluggish :( and there are alot of things fubar on it.
So I was thinking of doing a re-install but I wasnt sure which flavor would be best with equipment I have. I dont really need all the bells and whistles, just some kind of gui interface and stability. I was thinking of possibibly FreeBSd, but not sure how easy it is to install. Any suggestions would be great! thanks

Rob

[Hayl]

you should use the search on JustLinux. there are a ton of this type of thread already.

you should be able to run any distro as long as you don't use KDE or Gnome.

also, most distros include minimum system specs on ther web sites. (www.distrowatch.com)

[pezplaya]

I have a PII 400mhz box up right now running Redhat9 along with kde 3.1.1. Kde is a little slow, but still works fine.

[rameyd]

I'm running Gentoo on a P233, 64 Meg Ram. I use fluxbox when I want a Gui and it is very quick. The big apps are still pokey (it is only a 233 after all) but for ftp, web etc it is still super.

Pack a lunch when doing the initial emerge and compiles and definitely pre-read and then follow closely the Install docs. The initial build is a snap when you do.

I'm very pleased with the performance. Plus, gentoo.org has a great forum that can help you resolve almost anything you run in to.

enjoy.

Dave

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by jakedakat

PII 400 mhz
192 megs for Ram
30 gig + 75 gig drives


That should be sufficient to run any of the latest distro versions and KDE or Gnome.

<edit>

I have KDE 3.0.1 running on a 128mb laptop and I don't find it slow at all. Actually it's quite fast.

[root.veg]

> PII 400 mhz
> 192 megs for Ram
> 30 gig + 75 gig drives


Wow! that's better than my best machine! Well almost - my processor is a Celeron 500MHz, but I only just upgraded to 192 MB RAM and I have a grand total of 2+3 GB hard-drive space.

Back when I had 128 MB RAM and was trying out different window managers and stuff, I could run KDE or GNOME fine. I can run KDE or GNOME perfectly well nowadays when I use Knoppix - you shouldn't have any problems with either of them I don't believe.

[serz]

GNOME would run fast, but KDE won't run that fast.

Moved to /dev/random.

[jakedakat]

Thanks for the advice, I went with mandrake 9.0. Would have used 9.1 but I spilled beer on that cd :)
It seems to run alot quicker than RH 8.0, RH just seemed real sluggish on my PII. Also some weird things started going wrong, like I couldnt log into any account but the root account. Every other login would just hang at splash screen. Not sure if I was hacked or I just screwed something up myself hehe.
But thats what fresh installs are for!

Rob