[NCLUG] linux for old 95 machine?

[Goodman,Darrin]

> The in-laws have wireless and a win95 machine with 64mb ram and one  
> 2gig HD and a 1gig HD.   Any recommendations for them?   (besides buy  
> a new computer from system76)

> I'd like them to read e-mail, but that's about all they really need.   
> Web would be nice, too, but I'm thinking probably unlikely.

> I'd appreciate some recommendations...

> I've only used ubuntu, and don't have any familiarity with Puppy or  
> DSL.    Is DSL my only real bet?

DSL uses the 2.4 kernel, which (from what I understand) does a better job of supporting older hardware than the newer 2.6 kernel.  Personally, I really like DSL and prefer to use the 3.4.12 version (it's menu driven - Fluxbox, and is the most current 3.4.x version at this time).  Puppy Linux is possibly a little bit more intuitive if the user is coming from a Windows background, but I prefer DSL over Puppy for various reasons.  To me, DSL is simple, easy to use, customizable, and is pretty powerful for a 50MB OS.  

My most frequently-used "old" machine currently is a P2 ThinkPad and it runs on DSL; I use it mostly as a PHP test server (Apache/PHP), and it also runs wireless just fine for web surfing.  DSL is based on Knoppix/Debian; it's easy to enable apt for package management, but be careful with this because not all Debian software plays nice with DSL.  I try to stick with DSL packages for the most part, or build from source. 

Regarding email: DSL comes with Sylpheed, which is a light-weight email client.  I've never used it since I use Gmail, but having looked at the configuration at some point in the past, Sylpheed seems relatively easy to configure (probably no harder than Thunderbird, Evolution, or any of the others). 

Since your in-laws are limited on HDD space, they could easily use a USB flash drive or USB external HDD for storing files.

-Darrin