Best distro for older hardware?

[Linuxneophyte]

I'm putting Linux on a pretty old computer (like Pentium 100 w/ 96 megs of ram). Was wondering what the best distro would be that uses a good windows manager (what's better Gnome or KDE?). I installed Redhat 7.1 last night, but the thing runs like a dog with KDE, much slower than Win98. Redhat seems like a huge installation as well. Over like a gig worth of stuff, most of it sounding like I don't need it. I was thinking about trying SuSe or Mandrake. Already tried Corel and BestLinux, but neither of those work.

[Marcel2008]

Kde is slow, i suggest gnome. It's not the distro. You can also try some basic window managers like blackbox or windowmaker.

[kuit]

For a faster more Windows like Windows Manager try IceWM. It's fast and easy to use. Since you are using redhat try to use FVWM2 or FVWM. They are fast but not so good lookin. Its not the distro. It's KDE.

If your looking for a bare bones Linux distro, Peanut Linux is great. Only a 40meg download. Just do a search for it on yahoo.

Kuit

[Linuxneophyte]

Hmmm, well, okay. I'll try to install Gnome. Not quite sure how to uninstall and install packages, so I'll just do a reinstall.

This is a little disappointing though. I thought Linux was supposed to be less bloated then Windows. On a Pentium 100 w/96 megs ram and a SCSI harddrive Win98 runs at a pretty decent speed. But with KDE it takes forever just to navigate the control panel or open a simple program or help file.

I'd understand if it was because I installed it on a DOS partition, but it seems kind of silly.

[lm72]

Running with UMSDOS (On FAT or FAT32) will make very slow.
Run with natvie fs(Ext2) or ReseirFS you will see much better performance.


Alex :)

[ 26 June 2001: Message edited by: lm72 ]

[Grishnackh]

I have a P120 with 64mb ram as a second linux PC, it is currently running Mandrake 8.0 with KDE, and i must say it runs pretty smooth, only booting it up takes a while.

[Linuxneophyte]

No, that's what I'm saying, I'm running it on a native partition (I have a 2 gig partition for it and a 96 meg swap file). I reinstalled Redhat 7.1 and put on Gnome instead (also Windowmaker and FMWV2 but I don't know how to access those yet). Gnome's a little better, but still pretty slow. Especially compared to Windows. It seems so bloated and sluggish. I think it might be Redhat (I mean that other guy said he has it running on a Pentium 120, 20 megahertz isn't that much difference).

[Molecule Man]

IceWM, Blackbox, just Sawfish, XFCE would all be good choice for WMs.

IF you want a more minimalist distro try Vector Linux (http://www.ibiblio.org/vectorlinux).

[ille_pugil42]

or slack... :)