The RAM is a little on the low side, 512M is the recommended to run a GUI at the moment I think but 128M is all that's required for Command line, and GUI would probably run but might be a little slow to respond. But otherwise this machine should do run Centos 5 fine. The CPU and HD are more then adequate Ubuntu is the anther distro to play with if you want to play with a non-RPM based distro. With all the distro's I've played with Centos 5 and the current Ubuntu 9 (http://www.ubuntu.com/ ) are about the easiest to get up and running. Both of these distro's have a nice constant stream of free software updates/upgrades being feed into them so having an network connection available helps. -----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf Of Dmitry Sent: Monday, July 06, 2009 11:45 AM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: [CentOS] hardware requirements for Centos 2 Hi. Could you please give me advice about issue described below. My friends have to use a PC with old hardware for a few months. They've got 128MB of RAM, 20 GB hard drive; Pentium 3 processor. At the moment they have windows xp running on it, but it's very slow. What are the system requirements for CentOS 2 or any other version of this OS that may be suitable? Can you recommend any other Linux distro that would be easy to install and to use? Thanks in advance for any input. _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS at centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos