Good cheapie distribution = older version of Mandrake is probably your best bet. By "older" I mean like 7.1 (probably my favorite mandrake distro), although you can use later if you want. Later versions, I've noticed, will make assumptions about the kind of horse power you should have, so I don't recomend you install something like RH9, unless you plan to use something other than KDE or Gnome.
"Hardware of a time period should be accompanied by the software of that time period." Not always the case, but in this case probably prudent. If you can find a copy of Stormix (come to think of it, I think I have one somewhere around here), you can always go ahead and Debian-ize it with the parts you want.
Finally, if you just want something to plop in there, ASP Linux (http://linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=25) has worked surprisingly well for me.
Gnorb
On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 22:45, Tim Wright wrote:
My girlfriend's Windows 98 had the digital equivalent to a stroke, and I ran
> out of cusswords trying to re-install that OS from the CD-ROM. The computer
> is an Acer Aspire with an AMD i586 or i686 processor (K6?), 32Meg of RAM and
> a single expansion slot used by a winmodem. I successfully installed DOS 5.0,
> which tells me that the hardware is more or less OK.
>
> It generated kernal panics when I tried installing Caldera eDesktop 2.4, so I
> tried Red Hat 7.1. The install was about 98% done when Anaconda generated a
> couple of error messages, then the system terminated. I wasn't watching the
> monitor when it went south. A copy of the dump is attached for what it's
> worth. The machine won't boot into Linux, although it goes into DOS without a
> hitch. I suspect the Red Hat install is DOA.
>
> What is a good "lightweight" distribution for a cheapie machine like this?
> All it really needs to do is run KMail, a web browser, Pixie, and some simple
> multimedia apps. Xandros comes to mind, but there may be a simpler way out.
> Suggestions?
>
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