old laptop

[yawningdog]

My navy reserve unit (SPAWAR 506) just gave me an old laptop to install Linux on. Its an old 166 mhz Pentium with 65 mb and about 1.5 gb of unpartitioned space.

I've tried my copy of Mandrake 9.0, but It's not working and I suspect it would be too cumbersome anyway on a machine with such low resources. Which would anyone say is the best distro for this, and where would I look for it? Its not a brand name machine you would probably recognize. Indigo, or something.

[DoverGeek]

What is your goal for the laptop?

Based on what you want to actually use the laptop for once you get Linux on it will help determine what distro and apps you install on it.

Also, do you know what kind of hardware it has? Knowing the exact brand and model of each piece of hardware will make putting Linux and getting it to run right a lot easier than having to wing it.

[gcon]

i went through something similar not too long ago on a 233MHz w/ 64MB ram...i chose Vector Linux and have been very pleased. I find that Vector is very fast, and low on the resources. Other apps (such as openoffice.org) bring it to its knees, but it keeps on going.

I must warn you, however, that Vector was not particularly straightforward when setting up networking. In fact, I still can't figure out how to make eth0 come up on boot.

You can get Vectorlinux at www.vectorlinux.com or www.linuxiso.org