Which linux is for me?


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I found a dual pentium 166mhz machine with 96mb of ram and scisi 2.4 gig hd. I want to make it into a webserver/mail server for my webpage. Thats all I want it to do. It has built in everything (video/lan/sound) What linux distro is the best for me and the easiest to use. I'm comfortable with command line interfaces but would really like an easy to install easy to use gui interface. Any ideas?

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I pretty much use Red Hat for anything these days... Slackware is nice if you want a clean and fast little server though :)

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well if you only want to use for those 2 options

gentoo

i'd say gentoo

or slackware or maybe even linuxfromscratch

its a tad lenghty

but its cute and quick, and crisp. no rubbish.

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to all the people saying gentoo or redhat or mandrake:

did you even look at his computer's specs?

gentoo will take ages to compile, and the latest (and some versions before the latest) redhat/mandrake are much too large and too slow for this old machine

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I would recomend redhat if you don't have a lot of experience and want a simple and quick install. For that pc though if you feel comfortable enough trying a little harder and longer install i'd say go debian. Its not very big and would work great for your needs.

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gentoo will take ages to compile

agreed. That is unless you don't want a gui. You could always use the xfree and kde binaries though.

a BSD (openbsd is awesome) would probably make a very good server. I'd stay away from redhat if i were you. Its slow and bulky.

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did you even look at his computer's specs?

gentoo will take ages to compile

What make you think that he's going to watch on this machine at all the time while it's compiling? I don't see the problem to compile it, when you have the another computer to surf website and etc.

a BSD (openbsd is awesome) would probably make a very good server.

I would stay away from OpenBSD and NetBSD for the SMP machine. FreeBSD 5.1 is good for the SMP machine and it's still improvement so far.

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What make you think that he's going to watch on this machine at all the time while it's compiling?

No idiot actually watches it! I'm just saying it will take quite a long time, near a week, to get it up.

I suggested openbsd because its pretty damn stable and extremely secure. Freebsd is also a great choice.

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No idiot actually watches it! I'm just saying it will take quite a long time, near a week, to get it up.

I suggested openbsd because its pretty damn stable and extremely secure. Freebsd is also a great choice.

hey it's fun to watch it compile...Little messages...very entertaining. Mind you I dont watch it very long, but I guess im a geek.

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No idiot actually watches it! I'm just saying it will take quite a long time, near a week, to get it up.

A week? Nah, I have done it before and it's only take near two days with X on FreeBSD, everything has been compiled by ports. The server stuff are such smaller than X stuff. Therefore, it's much shorter than X.

I suggested openbsd because its pretty damn stable and extremely secure. Freebsd is also a great choice.

Did you take a nice look on his hardware? OpenBSD doesn't support SMP yet, but there have projects that are working on it. FreeBSD already has the better SMP support. If his machine only has single CPU, I would support for OpenBSD or NetBSD, because they are such smaller than FreeBSD.

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it's not dual p4, it's Dual pentium 166mhz. all of them are really fine to use. just pick one that u like to use. they will all get the job done. but like said before u might not want to use a new distro or new release for an older machiine

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