Hello all!

I recently found an old PC in storage and I am wanting to revamp it just to have some music on it and then I can hook the PC up to my receiver and surround sound.

I have been thinking of putting an old Debian distro on it but haven't been able to find anything that really seems to fit.

It's a 667 processor with only 64 meg of ram.

I believe the HD is 10gig (or maybe a little bigger)... It might be 20 but regardless.

This thing is kind of a piece of junk but I would hate to not do anything with it.

Suggestions? Especially where to find a good older distro to put on it?

Thanks!

I was going to go with Knoppix but I just don't have enough memory even with the 512 additional that I partitioned by itself.

I'm on the hunt again for what I'm going to use for this old beast.

with 64M RAM, you may be tight stretched. Have you looked into damn small linux? Also, there should be a flavor of deb that will fit that, that's part of thier mantra. I think your biggest challenge would be to find a desktop that will do it.

Yeah I burned a DSL ISO but haven't had luck with it for some reason. Should it be bootable? The HD is wiped now and I have two partitions set up. One just set aside with 512.

Someone suggested the Absolute Distro so I guess I'll give that a whirl as well...

Any suggestions as far as getting DSL to boot from a CD? Maybe I just burnt me a coaster or something...

Can't say I've tried every single distro out there, but having used most of the major ones, am partial to PCLinuxOS and Mandy for full featured desktops and VectorLinux 5.8 Standard (not SOHO) for memory challenged hdwr. I have used Xubuntu, SAM, Antix, DSL and Puppy but VL seems to fit my personality better.

Anyways, VL will run on 64mb RAM, but I don't recommend installing with less than 128mb . You can buy a couple sticks of 128mb RAM on ebay for $20 and have a great little server.

Just a hunch, I'm kind of betting his computer maxes out with 128.
Mark

you know, it's a lot of work, but slackware will probably run on that...

As far as DSL, if yopu made an install media out of a disk, as with all os install media, it needs to be bootable...

So as far as DSL, the CD I made ended up with nothing on it somehow. I was using Nero and from what I can see it didn't even burn... Weird. Got a copy of PowerISO Portable and everything went smooth.

Currently I'm installing Absolute and will probably try Slackware and then some flavor of Debian next. I'll just start plugging away until something works good. Note... the latest distro of Knoppix... not so good on a 64 meg system.

As far as memory I'm going to have to take a look at what I can plug into it. Plenty of old systems around here somewhere. Might have to scavenge for mem.

I appreciate all the suggestions. I'll keep this updated until something works.

Hey Trio3b! I am looking at downloading the ISO for VectorLinux 5.8 Standard. I'm looking at the download page for the OS and see an ISO file along with an MD5 file. What exactly is an MD5 file? Do I need to burn it along with the ISO. In the past I've simply burnt the ISO as an image.

What is an MD5 file for?

No real luck with the Absolute distro.

The md5 hash is provided so you can compare your download and
verify that it is correct. If the md5 provided does not match the sum of
the file you have then you most likely have a corrupt download.
You can use Google to find an md5 program for Windows, Linux has
it built in. From a command line type:
md5sum 'download.iso'
The result should match the hash provided with the download.

Thanks raw. I appreciate it. We'll see how this works out here. I appreciate everyone's help so far.