Hi,
Leo wrote:

> I have an old PC and I would like to give Linux a try on it. I make my
> living in the Wintel environment and cannot risk just jumping out of XP
> into a new OS before I am familiar with it.
>
> The PC in question is a Dell Dimension XPS R400
>
> Intel PII 400
> 128 MB RAM
> 10 Gig HD
> D-Link DFE-530-TX
> MS Wheel mouse
> Logitech Access Keyboard
> Crystal Sound (on the motherboard)
>
> What distro would run the best on this configuration? I tried Lindows
> 4.5 which I guess would probably run very well on my AMD 1800 machine
> but is as slow as molasses on the PII.
>
> It would be nice if I could get this machine zipping along and find some
> applications that are similar to what I use everyday (Dreamweaver,
> Photoshop, Outlook, Pinnacle Studio, Acoustica, Sonic Fire Pro, MS Word
> and MS Access).
>
> Looking forward to hearing what I should do.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Leo


I installed Debian Potato on a machine with lower specs and it worked fine,
then upgraded to Debian Woody which also worked well; I was happy with it.

My machine had an AMD K6-2/300 with 128 megs of ram and a 6 Gigabyte HD
which I partitioned in two as I was dual-booting with Win98SE.
I found KDE sluggish to start, but Gnome popped right up when I started it.
In any case the performance was as good or better than with Windoze, Since I
could dual boot, I could compare directly. Never did any benchmarking
though. I also had a Crystal sound card...worked fine with the OSS sound
driver in the kernel, but I had to fiddle around a bit first with the
configuration (in Potato, I think).

If you do install Debian Woody, you might use the bf24 kernal install so as
to get the latest and greatest; you might even want to get the kernel
source and recompile to get the optimum for your CPU.
A friend of mine installed Debian Sarge on one of his machine, but it really
is still in the 'testing' stage at present. Your mileage may vary ;-)

Hope my input is useful.
....Dave Dawson
P.S. My real email address is: beagle7[X]pacificcoast.net
replace the [X] with an @