Oh dear, you'll get sure a hole waterfall of good advice over you with these question; so here is my part in that:
I'd well say that precisely you should look for the most _recent_ versions of the various "distros" - firstly, they _did_ learn from the earlier pains of their users and have smoothened, and made much more flexible, that crucial install procedure. Secondly, their hardware recognition is much better. Purists and fundamentalists would most probably recommend the Debian or Slackware setups, where you indeed can squeeze the install down to the most rudimentary - but where you have to be already an expert in what you have to do, _before_ you ever would be able to succeed with it. So that's a catch-22, and warrants for lots of frustration. The latest Mandrake (8.2), however, can start with a bare-bones install of 65 MB, is indeed very easy to handle, and has an excellent package managment/intaller which is well to handle by newbies like me, in order to measure by measure build up the system to one's shoe-size. In fact I've just done that with a P-166 MMX with 48 MB RAM and a HD not so much larger than the one you mention. It had a win$ on it, and a small DOS partition, together with a Mandrake 7.2. I shortly had the Mandrake updated to 8.1, but now did a whole new install as I don't need the Win$ any more (thanks to a COMMERCIAL Linux prog, <bg> which finally could replace the one Win$gadget I had needed; never got the free-source equivalent to work on that beast). I took care to use a "small" X-window manager though (icewm), which allows well enoug to run the three main tasks the "graphical" UI is needed for (pics storage and first rough treatment, some basic sound file treatment, and the fat pixel browser); all mailing/writing is done in text mode anyway (and, BTW, still in DOS, even on this machine, it's just faster.) The MMX specifics of the CPU are well used by the "optimized" Mandrake- kernel, and make that laptop (a Toshiba with inherently slow display) reasonably fast to work with, compared with the "big box" of other Linux installs with lots of whistles and bells. Though even there, I shall replace a highly politically correct Debian on the biggest HD I have (bays to exchange HD - a dead simple, old and real, thus more important innovation than again some more MHz of the CPU which promptly needs a new socket, i.e. new motherboard, and so on) by the MMX-aware Mandrake. But that's definitely not "Surv"-PC any more - where I would put the bar lower anyway, even below the '486s; rather nearer above this '286 with its Hercules mono screen and DOS only, with which I do almost all "real" (i.e. paid) work and net work. And this one consumes less current than one of the desk lamps during all the long hours of reading, editing, brooding, and ranting. <bg> // Heimo Claasen // <hammer at revobild dot net> // Brussels 2002-05-12 The WebPlace of ReRead - and much to read ==> http://www.revobild.net To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
