best/easiest distro for an old pc

Well my friends dad gave me his old pentium 90, and I wanna dive into the linux pool with it. I was wondering what would be the best distro for this? I've heard that linux works pretty good with older systems so I want to give it a try, but I just need a good starting point. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Any distro will work, some might run slower than others, but anything will work. I have Slackware on a P90, and have had Red Hat on it also. The main thing about setting up an older machine is to know what to install and what not to install. Some of the window managers, like Gnome & KDE will run really slow because they are larger pieces of software, other programs you won't need to install because you won't ever use them unless you are setting up a server or something like that.

You might want to try taking a look that the distro list at Linux Online, as you might be interested in minimalist distributions since they tend to be geared to older machines. But like I said anything will work with your computer.

http://www.linux.org/dist/index.html

the best *nix i had running on slow-*** hardware was FreeBSD. the bsd's get a bad rap, but they are pretty intuitive and definately do better on slow hardware.

good luck!

A P90 is going to be tough. I think you will be limited to command line. I would use it for smoothwall box. You could use it for a router. I thinks that about all your options for a P90 these days. I guess you could vapour chill it in to a P120

You might be able to use X with a minimalist window manager. Fluxbox or something of the sort, even then it will be rather slow.

You'd be suprised what some of these older machines can do sometimes. I have a P166 that at one time served as a web server, ftp, samba, and MOHAA game server (it was fast enough up to 6 people, which was all it was used for anyway). Only could do all that under Linux though. MOHAA server wouldn't even load under Win95. Its 128megs of RAM help a lot though. But I bet that if I bothered installing X on that machine it would do OK, just no KDE/GNOME.