Still trying...

[Aidan Gauland]

Hello again,

 I have now tried the Live CDs for AntiX, DSL, and Debian (using the  
Smart Boot Manager on a floppy to bootstrap the CD) on that old PC,  
and none of them work.  The Debian CD doesn't even get to the boot  
menu, but that might be the drive being flakey or a burn error, and  
DSL gets to some point and then says something went wrong (I can't  
remember what exactly) then drops into a very minimalist bash-like  
shell, and the AntiX CD gets to some odd point in the boot process  
and then freezes without fail every time.  I was wrong about how much  
RAM it has, it only has 16 MB instead of 64, so maybe that's the  
problem.

 Is there a way to tell a Live CD to use less RAM for the ramdisk?   
Should I resort to an old Linux distribution?  Or is there some way I  
can build a Linux system on my installed Debian system for the old PC?

-Aidan