Advise a distro for an old machine please

[Midnight Mick]

I have a spare laptop that has seen better days.

It is a Pentium 3 (750Mhz) with 256 ram & a 20Gb HD.

I would like a simple Operating sytem on it that would just allow me to surf the net basically.

Can anyone please give me advise on which lightweight distro would be the best to use please?

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Xubuntu would be good for that, although any distro using a light weight desktop environment would do.

[Argote]

I'm personally fond of Debian

[markwolfe Veteran]

Xubuntu or other XFCE distro would be ok on that.

You could try to go lighter with Puppy or DamnSmallLinux, which are less resource-hungry than XFCE-based distros.

[Midnight Mick]

Thanks for the pointers :)

[roadgeek9]

I have a desktop with a P3 550 and it runs Fedora 9 pretty well...

[Bugballou]

Puppy Linux or PCLOS MiniMe 2008, especially if you are going to use a wireless connection, you will just need access to a copy of your windows driver (w / inf file) to get up and running on the internet. MiniMe has an adequate firewall/shorewall and once the system is set up and running you can make a live CD/DVD remaster. There are also quite a few other community remasters of PCLOS 2007 available.

[Midnight Mick]

I tried Puppy linux before and tbh didn't really like it.

PClinuxOS minime, didn't like my laptop one little bit, it would only boot up in safe mode (live cd) & would not install.

I finally settled with Xubuntu 8.10 which I am very pleased with. :)

[Zerosleep]

As mark said, Damn Small Linux might be a good choice.

Runs great on a 133mhz machine I have. :D

[MidnightDevil]

As mark said, Damn Small Linux might be a good choice.

Runs great on a 133mhz machine I have. :D

+1 for DSL :D

[rson451]

Arch with any light wm would be a pretty good choice.

[dmd3x]

Use your distro of preference - with XFCE, Fluxbox or other lightweight window manager.