In my old PC, I currently have Mandrake 7 installed and since it's optimized for i586 class machines and above, I feel it runs too sluggish. I'm thinking about installing Slackware 9 instead but do you think my machine is good enough to run GNOME smoothly?

Pentium I-MMX @ 200mHz
32mb RAM
4gb HDD
2mb PCI Diamond Video Card
A Burned Out 17" CRT Monitor (works, but everything appears with a blue-ish colour)

This system was bought back in 1997. Can I run GNOME relatively well or am I just wasting a CD-R?

Not having enough memory, Mandrake having too many process runing and using Gnome is causing the PC to be sluggish.

There are several other light weight windows managers that would be faster unless you are forced to use Gnome.

Slack is a good choice.
Check here for other ideas.
http://old.lwn.net/Distributions/

I suggest you stick to the hardcore distributions like Debian or, as you stated, Slackware. You will find better performance for your machine. Mandrake, as you said, is optimized for i586, and comes with a lot of stuff enabled by default, eating up your cpu cycles and memory. Stickw ith the lightweight stuff, say....


Distro: Debian (minimal install of woody, find the network install iso, very useful)
Window Manager: Window Maker or Blackbox (light-weight, works great, tastes good and won't fill you up)
Web browser: Anything but Mozilla or Konqueror

Good luck

You may want to try College Linux ay www.college.ch/linux

It is a 1 CD distro. I installed it on an old computer similar to yours.

Even with only 32 MB, KDE runs on it but a bit slow at start up. I would recommend you use something light like blackbox rather than GNOME or KDE.

I also reccomend messing with hdparm like: http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/20.../29/hdparm.html says. I tried it and I am loving the results, much speedier, although I hear you have to be carefull or your system will hang.