I am looking for a linux distro to run on this low-end comp: intel p2 225mhz very little ram 5gig disk (I am willing to give 512 megs to virutal memory) I am going to use it for programming pourposes and not much else. any suggestions?

I've never tried it, but Gentoo is meant to be quite good. You compile everything from source, so it optimises itself for your own personal machine.

Downside is it apparently takes forever to compile things, especially on lower-end machines.

Debian.

'nuff said.

But what the hell, I'll say more. Just keep in mind that whatever distro you use, all the newer graphical things are going to be kinda slow for that computer, so it really comes down to just using a really minimalistic window manager, something like Fluxbox for example.

Slackware is also an option if you're willing to put a bit of effort into getting it up and running.

I love Gentoo, but compiling it on a P2—especially if you want a GUI environment—would be excruciatingly painful (unless you can distcc or compile on another box).

A better choice might be something like VectorLinux which, unlike the other distributions mentioned in this thread, is designed precisely to be light enough to run on lower-end machines. (For instance, they claim it should run fine on 32 MB of RAM.)

FreeBSD. Only needs 8MB RAM to install.

Quote: Original post by Miserable
A better choice might be something like VectorLinux which, unlike the other distributions mentioned in this thread, is designed precisely to be light enough to run on lower-end machines. (For instance, they claim it should run fine on 32 MB of RAM.)

VectorLinux is Slackware-based. Really the only difference is that it just doesn't have packages that would be resource-heavy, as far as I know. At least in terms of it being "designed for" low-end machines. You can essentially do this with any of the aforementioned distros, just maybe by selectively installing certain components.

I have less then a meg of ram

but as I said, I am willing to give 512 megs of my hd to virtual memory

Less than a meg of ram on a P2 225MHz? That seems really weird to me. If that's true, you'll have horrible performance no matter what distro you choose because you'll constantly be using swap.