www.knoppix.com
bootable from a cd.
download the image and burn it to a cd
drop in the disk tray and reboot.
viola. up, running ang ready to surf.
also, you can run it headless and use it for dns & whatnot.
make persistant home directories.. niiiice..
shiny..

I disagree, this is a comon pratice at theplanet.com and one of the techs who do RHE installs give's /var its own partition of 5-6 gigs, while this sounds nice in theory, it will only cause issues in the long run if you are running a website.

I like gentoo's instructions the best, boot swap everything else. 3paritions

Just to let you know there are other versions besides "knoppix" that can run straight from a CD. For a list of "Live CD's" available, here is a site I found.
http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php
It has all sorts. It all depends on what you will use it for. Check it out, see what you find. and if you don't like one try another. There are enough out there for everyone to find what they want.

Well, if your a refular visiter to the linux forums, you'll know about my adventures

otherwise:
I tried SUSE. Failed. Some peculaiar and random error
I tried Gentoo. SOB to install. cba to try
I tried slackware. Everything went well but after all the times I had partitioned the hdd the pc didnt boot proberly so I should have got boot floppy, but cba
So now im going to try the distro I swore I would never touch again: Mandrake. Its easy enough -_- I did it before, with the outcome of wiping my hard drive..

Anyway I'll keep looking. Eventually im gonna have a whole library of distros in my CD rack which is never a bad thing

Hello Zach,

I run my internet www and ftp applications on their own 27 GB partition called /internet. It gets backed up, and is moving along just fine. The orig writer was looking for a small compact installation, and not a server class setup. I always move the internet applications to their own partition so that they are isolated, and I can spec out different tar commands.

Cup, did you try RedHat? You mentioned this is smaller hardware... perhaps 7.3?

Christian

Gentoo is a pain to install but well worth it

I read about compresson, well a 650mb ISO fle (what ever the ratio is set at) could be huge, like mentions from 1 - 4 gig's, lol. I used suse 9.1, it came out to 2.5 gigs with everything isntalled, so nvm that. hehe, lol. Stick to live distros till you know whats going on (=. Thats what i do.

If you have problems with other distro's try Damn Small Linux, it has a great "App Get" feature in it's newer versions. Around 50 meg installed will leave you plenty of room for whatever else you need.

Also consider the fact the distro could be currupt to a malfunction in the burning process of the iso image to a cd. If you have it set higher then 24X I cant promise the quality of the disk try to keep it around 18X-24X. It starts off so fast it will miss files or write them to fast and ruin them.

?!

I burn between 10 and 40 CDs per week on either a 48x or a 52x drive (including Linux & UNIX ISOs) and have never heard of "anything faster than 24x will cause problems." Most of the burning software today caches files before it writes them to the disc, so the possibility of "starting off too fast it misses files" is about the same as getting run over by an elephant while washing windows on the Empire State building.

If you want to make sure the .ISO you download is intact, check the MD5 checksum after the download is complete. If they match, you're good to go. If it isn't, delete the download and try it again from another location.