old pc

[Xaver]

help i have a laptop with 133 mhz pentium cpu and 16 mb ram i download VL5.9-Light-FINAL and now i want to install it, this laptop cant load from cdrom, how can i do the bootable disk to load installer of VL? i write rootdisk.img with rawrite  from install\floppy and nothing is loaded.

[nightflier]

You can download VL6.0 Light. It has been updated for floppy installation. Find five images in /install/floppy directory. These can be used with earlier versions of VL too. Another option is to use Smart Boot Manager on a floppy and see if it can force a boot off the CD.

Now, although it can be done:  http://forum.vectorlinux.com/index.php?topic=9138 
I would not put VL on a machine like that unless it's purely for experimentation. Even a functional command line will need the udev hack I mention in the above post. I'd recommend you first try some mini-distros like Basiclinux or DSL.

Smart Boot Manager: http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/
DSL: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
Basiclinux: http://www.volny.cz/basiclinux/

[M0E-lnx]

tinycore

[AirborneDude501]

The problem with using TinyCore on a P133mhz is that it uses the 2.6 kernel.  The old P1 hardware might not run correctly with it, but it is worth a try.

Damn Small Linux (Which used to be TinyCore founders project) is a better choice because it uses the 2.4 kernel, but it isn't supported anymore.   

I have run DSL on a P100mhz with 32mb of RAM and it ran ok, but Firefox took 2 minutes to come up.   Sea Monkey worked better as a browser on the older box. 

Slitax is a good choice also for old hardware.