What distro for really old hardware

[TalRW]

Hi I'm a complete n00b at linux, never used it before. I have a laptop P166 40 megs of RAM and I would like to try linux for school. I just want to use it for maybe school work internet (firefox) and just learning the ins and outs of linux. Can anyone recomend a distro that would probably run on this system and maybe acomplish all this. I tried looking at the beginner distro guide but he installed it on a XP2500 and I'm no where close to that so I was wondering about my hardware.

Problem: Ok I tried gentoo knoppix and fedora and I keep getting this problem where it gives me a buncha gobildy gook and then it finally says I can't even get to anyplace where I can even try to install anything.

code: 8b 46 0c 8d 48 6c f0 ff48 6c 0f 88 e3 00 00 00 ff 74 24 10
<0>Kernal panic: Attempted to kill init!

 

[MRD]

Try slackware. It's not the easiest distro by a long shot, but it's pretty lean and will work better than most on old hardware. You can also try Damn Small Linux. Debian is ok, but not as lean as the others, and you have low ram.

 

[TalRW]

Thanks DSL worked. Gonna keep working with that and test it out.

 

[ErikD]

You can also install DSL to the HD if you want. Thats what I did with my older laptop. Slackware is good for older hardware, but I don't know about a P166 with only 40MB of RAM. I think the full install is something like 3GB. Anyway I tried it on a PII 400 with 128MB of RAM and it could get bogged down on some things. For the most part it did work nicely though.