Thank you for that, it's one for my keep list, bookmarked .

Hi all,

I experienced Puppy Linux and works fine also on old systems.
Maybe you could try netbsd or openbsd, in the case you want to leave alone your server on the internet.

BR
Andrea

+1 for Slackware or *BSD. Forget about xAMP on a PC with such specs, go for lighttpd and vsftpd (or the FTP server in base if you choose BSD, it's pretty good).

You can fit Debian netinstall into 20mb with some tweaks pretty easy, I'd look into that.

As far as I know, you can run any minimal linux system on those specs, though slackware derivatives don't use that many processes.

by minimal, i mean commandline. if you want a gui, use JWM. it is just 42kb as a binary, and it uses the least resources of any X11 window manager.

You can do this with Debian. Just during the install make sure to customize and pair down the package list, and when selecting a GUI select a lightweight window manager like Xfce. It takes more time because you have to pick and choose specific packages important to you, but it's definitely possible.

An IBM machine with the specs listed by the OP will usually be a 486. Debian and Slackware still provide releases supporting a 486, but most other distributions are built for Pentium or newer processors by default. You could compile one of the others from source using the 486 as a target (still supported by GCC). If you have a 386 by some chance and you will need a distribution from before around 2002 when GCC 3.2 stopped supporting the target.

You're probably going to want to cross-compile packages from source for your 486 on a faster machine. I would personally have an easier time compiling and have better performance on that hardware with FreeBSD or NetBSD.

I know this is an old topic, but I think this is a common question without a great answer. I've used DSL on my P200MMX, and it wasn't very good. Very old versions of everything, and a lot of broken packages. Systems with newer kernels and packages (e.g. 2.6 kernels and gtk2.0) are too slow on it.

What I'd really like to see is a desktop oriented distro that ships with a modern kernel, but with uClinux and busybox. There are plenty of embedded distros with this setup, but nothing that targets old machines for desktop use. For those of us who only want X to multiplex terminals and display images, this would be really useful.

it might be worth trying zipslack to have a play with linux on lower spec HW. its distributed in the earlier slackware releases as a zip file which extracts a whole distribution to a directory.
you can then play and its easy to delete if you change your mind. I think it extracts to about 100MB without GUI and you install it to a FAT partition

I had a friend do comparisons for servers he was setting up and Gentoo turned out to have the smallest footprint when you built it to your own specifications. Debian was also a good choice, and I currently run Debian in a stripped down CLI-only install. Just be sure to stay away from Ubuntu, even taking out most of the packages you will max out your RAM in a heartbeat.

I suggest Debian With lighttpd,mysql,php . Be sure to configure lighttpd correctly though
I have a machine with a 800mhz processor and 128mb ram running just fine with that setup.