[NoCmpromiz]

2GB should definitely be enough for most of them

Well... I looked and it's 1 gig instead of 2.. (2 512 sticks - i thought it had more than that..)

does the disc drive spin when you boot the machine?

Yes. Boot order is floppy, cd, then hard drive. It actually starts to load and just seizes up. I'd need to look at it again to see at what point, but I get screen display that it's loading Linux and tells me it's Mint 16. Then it gets to a point where nothing happens and I'm stuck looking at a really funky looking screen display.. Your thought that it's running out of headroom sounds plausible. I guess I'll need to do some research here, first to find if 1G is enough for Mint 16 32bit...

[GeronL]

All the Linux Mint 16 distro’s aI have read about are 64-bit and are all more than a GB in size. I guess I should dig around for some 32-bit ones and see if they are smaller.

[GeronL]

http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=143

Linux Mint 16 32-bit versions

Cinnamon is 1.1 GB

NATE desktop is 1.2 GB

KDE desktop is 1.3 GB

Xfce desktop is 1.1 GB

[GeronL]

You also need some RAM to do things besides run an OS. Remember to look for a distribution release and not a development release (test version, probably with many bugs)

........

For instance:
Quirky Linux is a variant of Puppy Linux (called a Pupplet) is about 160 MB.. so what is quirky about Quirky? A black and white desktop maybe?

http://bkhome.org/quirky/

................

Tiny Core Linux 5.2 chimes in at just 72 MB.

I haven't used these distro's. I doubt they are as smooth or as functional as my Ubuntu. I did try out a bunch of other distro's and found them lacking.

Others have their own opinions of course.