[durant125]

I was looking for help in picking the right linux flavor. I am mainly going to be toying around in the shell, but would still like graphics, along with internet access, and a writing program perhaps openoffice or something similar. I need the system to be a combination of stability and fast. I am not a patient man and my hands are just getting wet with linux. I ask for help because there is just too many flavors to choose from. My system is 10 years old and currently running WIN98FE painfully slow. Oh yeah almost forgot I was looking into getting a bigger hard drive. What I found on some forums is that my BIOS won't recognize anything much bigger than 4.3GB and there is no BIOS upgrades. Can Linux potentially see a bigger hard drive possibly 20GB?
I have CompaqPresario 5304. Specs go accordingly:

Processor MII 366 MMX Enhanced Processor
System Bus 100 MHz system bus
Cache 512KB L2 Pipeline Burst Cache
System Memory 64 MB 100MHz SynchDRAM shared memory architecture
upgrading the ram believe i bought 128mb which comes to 172mb?
Hard Drive 4.3 GB UltraDMA Hard Drive

[Sid6]

I don't know how skilled you are but I have been cutting my teeth on Ubuntu. I think it will run on that system.. One thing before jumping in to this is look around I think there are over 700 different distributions of Linux.Try to find the one that sound the best for you.

This is the link to the forum at Ubuntu:http://ubuntuforums.org/index.php

Sid

[PoleStar]

Use distro with XFCE desktop environment(like xubuntu)

[TerryNet]

With that memory the most you want is as PoleStar indicated. You may like Puppy Linux; on my old laptop (see specs) it boots in a minute and shuts down in 15 seconds. Xubuntu at first seemed promising, but bogged down nearly as much as XP. Maybe the 172 meg for you will make a difference vs. my 128.

[durant125]

I've tried puppy and liked it. I've also tried Mandriva, Fedora, and Suse (very little). My favorite is Mandriva probably because I used it the most next to fedora. I'm looking for something fast, puppy I know would work but anything a little bigger? I know there is tons of distros or "flavors" out there just was looking for opinions that's all.

As far as xubuntu I might give it a shot since I am upgrading to maybe a Pentium II or III.

As far as my linux knowledge. I try to work out of console as much as possible, I know how to start and kill processes, "make" files, edit some configuration files, and a lot of the basics, like moving files, renaming, creating new ones, VIM, etc.

Thanks Polestar for the tip.

[net_newsy]

with that computer specs, try Vector Linux, http://vectorlinux.com/downloads

* Standard Edition: Pentium 200 or better, 96MB RAM, 2.1GB hard drive space for system only, more for your data.

* Light Edition: Pentium 166 or better, 64MB RAM minimum, 1.8GB hard drive space for full system - more for your data.

-------
or take the smaller DeLi Linux, http://www.delilinux.org/

* that runs even on 486DX2 66MHz and/or Pentium I 133MHz systems

[Wino]

Originally Posted by durant125

Processor MII 366 MMX Enhanced Processor
System Bus 100 MHz system bus
Cache 512KB L2 Pipeline Burst Cache
System Memory 64 MB 100MHz SynchDRAM shared memory architecture
upgrading the ram believe i bought 128mb which comes to 172mb?
Hard Drive 4.3 GB UltraDMA Hard Drive

I tried installing Ubuntu 8.04 on a Compaq 1270 laptop with slightly better specs than your machine and it was a no go. It almost made it with Kubuntu, but just couldn't quite make it. Although, being a Compaq may be the problem rather than the specs.

[rob.rice]

slackware-10
as long as the kernel can boot on the hard drive it doesn't
matter what the BIOS sees it as
go to a computer repair shop with one of your memory cards play show and tell you can get outdated memory cheap get as much as you can afford

this will work for you too wino