I am a Linux newbie. I have Slackware 10.1 on a P-III 500mhz, and Red Hat 9.3 on a P-II 266 mhz. I have been trying to learn them for about a week with Slackware and 2 with Red Hat. I am not having a good time.

Until I found Puppy Linux. It is referred to as a live CD verison. It is 50 to 60 meg. You burn the ISO image to a CD or DVD and boot form that cd. In about a minute or two you are up and running. In a couple of more minutes you are on the net ( I use a cable modem ). It comes with Open Office Lite. A verison called Chubby Puppy has a few more features.
You will need at least a 200 mhz, and 128 mb of ram. You will also need 50 meg of hard drive with this amount of ram. If you have 256 mb of ram the whole program will boot into a Ram Drive that it will make when it boots. If you have a CD or DVD burner you can set it up to burn your data and preferences back onto the disk. And once booted you can still use the CD/DVD drive just remove the boot CD/DVD
This is a compete OS and programs suite in a 60 meg or less file. You can still make changes just like in the other Linux flavors, but if you make a mistake you just reboot and all is forgiven.

Damn Small Linux is another good one coming in at just under 50Mb.
It's a LiveCD also so no changes are made to yor current OS.
If you prefer a "full" system Knoppix can do that for you. It has a ton of software and runs totally
off the CD.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

I like Knoppix.... i used that distro when my Windows xp crashed, and i used the boot disc with Knoppix on it to save a lot of my files before re-formatting.... It's pretty convenient if you want a taste of linux without the whole "dual-boot" fiasco

I will have to try them. I was very impressed with the easy of use. I see a lot of newbie, like myself, strugle with Linux.

i just started to use knoppix live cd..

it seem nice to me.. got lots of application inside..
gonna take u time to explore all.. hee..

The way the mount without installing I am going to try most of them. I am very impressed. They are alot of fun.

Um Can I please have direct downlaod link? my Internet connection keeps failing when I click on Hard Drive!

Thanks!