all this chatting about linux, what can be done with a 200mhz machine?

I know this is an awful question and please dont rip my head off. I guess im just looking for someone to say "research SUSE x.x, it should be a good starting point". You get the idea.

I have an old 200mhz with 256 megs of ram. Probably have a few 6 gig hard drives laying about as well. My thought was using it to learn Linux and experiment with its musical/networking capabilities (thinking about playing my mp3 collections in other rooms, accessing the network, etc). I may even attempt a lil mobile apllication. Can anything be done with this old paper-weight? If so, what do you recommend i download and try out.

My favorite is Debian. www.debian.org Although the install is a bit more involved. Mandrake is very good for beginners.
For a 200MHz machine, I would not recommend a graphical interface. You can boot straight to a command prompt really quickly and there are several command-line mp3 players.

If you really wanna see Linux at full potential, you can download something called a "live cd" and run it on your main (hopefully faster) PC. A live cd will boot linux from nothing but the cdrom, so no worrying about having to install to your harddisk.

You could install a small distro like one of those 50MB ones. Then have it run in ram. It should be reasonably fast enough.

One thing that would help is adding a bunch of memory and running as much as you can in ram.

Maybe 'damn small linux' could get you started. Just google for it.

Try the Slax distros.

They have one thats called " Kill Bill" that runs fine on my 233.
It has KDE and Firefox etc ... al the basics and a great U/I.
I had to up the memory to at least 196mb for it to work properly with the GUI.

I believe that the 200mhz was still considered a Pentium, where the 233mhz MMX was considered a Pent II.

Give it a shot, if it don't work, eject the CD and reboot, nothin to loose.

good luck
Don
EDIT: there is also SLAX Popcorn, which is really really small and still has a GUI.

Thanks gents!

(for the advice and not ripping my head off :nutz: )

Although a 200Mhz machine can do a lot of cool things using Linux, learning Linux isn't really one of them -- unless you like waiting!

See if you can't score a P3 or better machine (or dual-boot your Windows box) for learning, and then save the slower machine for deployment.

-g.

Have you try amacdys? But I don't really know if it answers your question if you want to put it in a car...

its a bit outdated but try it if you want..

With a 200 Mhz you can do a lot :)

My first platform was built with a P 133 Mhz, 64 Mb of RAM and a 4 Gb Hdisk.
Kde is too heavy, you should better forget it but...there's a fast graphical environment which will help you at least to test, WindoMaker ;)

I run on it Xmms and Xine but unfortunately the graphics card was a S3 with only 4 Mb which is really too low for video decoding and in overall the cpu will be too little to manage allright with the movies.

About the distro now it's up to you to chose the flavour you want, there's a lot of litterature on the internet as you know.

OT: Kraft, I would pay for a PC Badge that looked like your avatar. I need a Linux sticker for my laptop. Unfortunately, the only ones around a the square dome badges. I want one that mocks the WinXP sticker I razored off.