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Are they getting something like Puppy Linux? http://www.puppyos.com/ This can be used on a flash drive to run Linux on any computer that is capable of booting from USB.

and Linux for that matter.

Did I read that right? Were you actually bragging about a 250 MB image size? Or did you misplace the decimal point? Have you seen Puppy Linux? The .iso image is 60 MB, and the whole system can run in memory on machines with only 128 MB of ram. And it has a window manager, a web browser/email client (Mozilla "SeaMonkey"), AbiWord, gxine, gaim, and a bunch of other stuff. Since embedded versions of Linux have all the unused apps removed from the image, I really wouldn't be surprised if it was possible to make a 15-30 MB .iso image for a fully functional system.

Yeah, Damn Small Linux is good, but I prefer Puppy Linux because I've found it to be more easily customizable. Using Puppy Unleashed, I've made a custom version that includes the software I consider essential (vim, screen, sshfs, mplayer, mp3blaster, ratpoison, etc). Each of those is not available on the standard live-cd, but I added them to my custom version - and got them working the way I like - with a few hours of work. Most of that time was spent burning test CD-RW's to make sure that everything interacted correctly (elinks needs to know how to play nice with screen, ~/.bashrc needs to included vim specific variables, among other details).

Boot process (for my somewhat large ~85MB version) is under 1 min on the machine I most recently tested (a 1.4ghz athalon box with 512MB RAM). That is faster than the WinXP boot process for that machine. Several versions of Puppy fit on a 50MB buisiness card sized CD and load even faster.

Puppy Linux is a newbie-friendly alternate to DSL. Although (in my opinion) less suitable for hacking, it is a decent mini-desktop solution. Plus it comes in different flavors.

My favorite is Vector SOHO http://www.vectorlinux.com/ It was way easier for me to setup up than Ubuntu, and has a lot of nice apps straight off the cd. user support forum: http://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/

Now if you want a distro to try out and get a feel for linux, Puppy http://www.puppyos.com/ is a great live distro designed from scratch to appeal to Windows users and runs great on older equipment. (Its user support is first rate too! http://www.puppyos.com/forums.htm )

Both great Os(es) that I feel are really under rated.

My favorite is Vector SOHO http://www.vectorlinux.com/ It was way easier for me to setup up than Ubuntu, and has a lot of nice apps straight off the cd. user support forum: http://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/

Now if you want a distro to try out and get a feel for linux, Puppy http://www.puppyos.com/ is a great live distro designed from scratch to appeal to Windows users and runs great on older equipment. (Its user support is first rate too! http://www.puppyos.com/forums.htm )

Both great Os(es) that I feel are really under rated.

I've used Xfce 4.2 on Fedora Core 3 with just 64Mb RAM, but with about 128Mb swap and it's certainly usable (400MHz Celeron CPU) with Firefox 1.0, Abiword and other common apps.

I think running X adds more to the RAM requirements vs. Win9x, and I wonder what a system running the Linux framebuffer without X would require, assuming the GTK+ framebuffer support could be used.

Anyone with low RAM and a slow CPU should look at Puppy Linux

Hmm, I never use the "L" word when showing someone an alternate OS for their old systems.

I say, "Here's a copy of Puppy http://www.puppyos.com/ it works pretty good, Beatrix http://www.watsky.net/ looks really pretty if you want to try it." If their system's more up to date, Ubuntu or Vector. If they're actually still using a 486, Vector 1.8

Thing is, most of the people using an old windows OS are casual users, and as long as they can read their text files, browse pictures, and access "the internet" they don't care what's running, as long as it works.

Ever heard of Puppy? http://www.puppyos.com/
Designed to run on older software, and to be similar to Win 95/98.

Don't use it personally (I prefer Vector SoHo), but it is small, light, and runs "right out of the box" with software that covers the average 98 user's needs.

Puppy Linux (or PuppyOS) at http://www.puppyos.com/
First time I encountered it, it was 35MB.

Oh and it can be installed to hard disk to give a new life to old computer.

http://www.puppyos.com/