What's a good distro for old computers?

[Gomer_X]

I just spent the entire day playing with different OSes on this old PC (400 MHz AMD K6, 256 MB RAM, 8 GB Hard-drive), since the motherboard has a VIA chipset on it, it worked flawlessly with Slackware, no drivers at all needed to be loaded manually, it had it all right out of the box.

An AMD K6 is definitely not a 486. The fastest 486 ever made was about 133 Mhz. A K6 400 is a PII class machine (It's probably a K6-2, the K6 never ran that fast either).

I've got a K6-III 400 with 192 megs of RAM, and it's been running fine on Fedora for a couple years. Currently it has no GUI on it as I'm using it as a server. I put Slackware on it and was impressed with the performance. I also put FreeBSD on the machine with Fluxbox and was very impressed. A 400 Mhz machine is very usable with a lightweight window manager, and a great performer without X.

[Tsuroerusu]

I just spent the entire day playing with different OSes on this old PC (400 MHz AMD K6, 256 MB RAM, 8 GB Hard-drive), since the motherboard has a VIA chipset on it, it worked flawlessly with Slackware, no drivers at all needed to be loaded manually, it had it all right out of the box.

An AMD K6 is definitely not a 486. The fastest 486 ever made was about 133 Mhz. A K6 400 is a PII class machine (It's probably a K6-2, the K6 never ran that fast either).

I've got a K6-III 400 with 192 megs of RAM, and it's been running fine on Fedora for a couple years. Currently it has no GUI on it as I'm using it as a server. I put Slackware on it and was impressed with the performance. I also put FreeBSD on the machine with Fluxbox and was very impressed. A 400 Mhz machine is very usable with a lightweight window manager, and a great performer without X.

Thanks for correcting me on that, I guess all those x86'es confuses me a little

What would you classify a K6 CPU as? i586?

Anyway, I really look forward to trying OpenBSD 3.8 and FreeBSD 6.0 on this old computer.

[Gomer_X]

Thanks for correcting me on that, I guess all those x86'es confuses me a little

What would you classify a K6 CPU as? i586?

Anyway, I really look forward to trying OpenBSD 3.8 and FreeBSD 6.0 on this old computer.

Yes, a K6, K6-2 and K6-III are all considered 586 arch, I'm pretty sure. I know my K6-III runs 586 kernels on Fedora.

I've got a working Pentium 200 with 32 megs of RAM that I hope to get running one of these days. Slackware wouldn't install on it (at least I gave up before I could get it to work), I had some success with Debian. I'll probably eventually try FreeBSD when I get the time.

[Tsuroerusu]

Thanks for correcting me on that, I guess all those x86'es confuses me a little

What would you classify a K6 CPU as? i586?

Anyway, I really look forward to trying OpenBSD 3.8 and FreeBSD 6.0 on this old computer.

Yes, a K6, K6-2 and K6-III are all considered 586 arch, I'm pretty sure. I know my K6-III runs 586 kernels on Fedora.

I've got a working Pentium 200 with 32 megs of RAM that I hope to get running one of these days. Slackware wouldn't install on it (at least I gave up before I could get it to work), I had some success with Debian. I'll probably eventually try FreeBSD when I get the time.

Fair enough, right now I'm loading the new OpenBSD 3.8 onto this old machine I've got, gonna see what Theo and the rest of guys over at OpenBSD has been doing for the last six months

[DaveQB]

I run Vector on all my slow systems currently (with KDE) and its the quickest i have seen.

Its Slack made user friendly

VASM is its GUI admin tool and works well enough for now.

Strongly recommended from a user thats spent awhile trying to find a lightweight fast distro for older hardware.