Best flavor of Linux for a Y2K Pentium III tower?

Someone gave me an old tower computer that's still in pretty good shape, I'm thinking about putting Linux on it and was wondering if there is a distro that is particularly good for something like this..

If you need more details on the unit I can provide them tomorrow, all I know right now is that it's a P III with a 10 gigabyte hard drive.

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download
http://linuxmint.com/download.php

Here are the suggested system requirements:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements

I have an old Dell with a slow PIII and put ubuntu 8 onto it. I got ubuntu 8 to run fine while ignoring the requirements, but I did do some upgrades. The hard drive was crumbling so I replaced it. Machine originally had 128 mb RAM; I upgraded to 640gb. I upgraded the cpu to 850 mhz. I added a network card.

If you're really worried about having limited resources, try ubuyntu or mint with a lighter weight desktop, say xfce:

http://www.xubuntu.org/get
http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=62

There are also some super lightweight linux diatros, like Puppy, that some folk around here likew

I have run Linux off a live disk quite a few times but never had a separate computer to actually try it out for an extended period so this will be a learning experience for me..

I've been using Debian for a long time, so if there are any stumbling blocks in the installation I may have missed them.

LXDE is lighter and quicker than xubuntu.

http://lxde.org

It's possible to build even faster and lighter desktop environments, but that's where the learning curve gets really steep and the desktop starts to look more like a naked X windows system or else, if you are unwilling to adventure onto the command line, you become more confined to applications developed especially for your distribution.

all with c. 10gb virtual hard drives and one virtual processor (on edit: this virtual processor is 2.8 ghz)

one with 128 mb RAM, one with 256mb RAM, one with 512 mb RAM

128 mb RAM -- desktop wallpaper came up! waiting ... waiting .. waiting ... screw this
256 mb RAM -- desktop wallpaper came up! notification internet connection found! install screen came up! clicked install ... waiting ... waiting .. waiting ... screw this
512 mb RAM -- desktop wallpaper came up! notification internet connection found! install screen came up! clicked install: preparing to install screen came up! clicked forward: allocate drive space screen came up! clicked forward: clicked install now: Time Zone screen came up! clicked forward: keyboard layout screen came up! clicked forward: account info screen came up! filled in info and clicked forward: installation slideshow began! various messages for the next 20 minutes or so. installation complete message! restart: grub screen up! select ubuntu: login: system monitor says i've used 2.3 of my 9.8 gb virtual hard drive; firefox works. total time about 30 minutes

Also tried lubuntu 10.10
128 mb RAM -- language screen came up! ignored ... desktop wallpaper came up! desktop came up! clicked install icon ... waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... screw this
256 mb RAM -- language screen came up! ignored ... desktop wallpaper came up! desktop came up! clicked install icon ... waiting ... language screen came up! clicked forward ... waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... screw this
512 mb RAM -- language screen came up! ignored ... desktop wallpaper came up! desktop came up! clicked install icon ... waiting ... language screen came up! clicked forward: preparing to install screen came up! clicked forward: allocate drive space screen came up! clicked install now: Time Zone screen came up! clicked forward: keyboard layout screen came up! clicked forward: account info screen came up! filled in info and clicked forward: installation slideshow began! various messages for the next 15-20 minutes or so. installation complete message! restart: grub screen up! select ubuntu: login: system information says i've used 2.0 of my 9.8 gb virtual hard drive; chromium brower works. total time about 30 minutes

http://lubuntu.net/
http://linuxmint.com/rel_isadora_lxde.php

lubuntu feels a bit snappier than ubuntu

I might expect the recent ubuntu and its recent derivatives to behave similarly: you probably don't want less than 512mb RAM for installation

It'll run fine on 256 mb RAM, but it won't actually install on anything less than ubuntu itself requires.

Last time I tried lubuntu it installed the bulk of ubuntu first and then it trimmed the installation down to lubuntu. This was on a Pentium II laptop with 64 mb base RAM and another 256 mb in the upgrade slot.

The LXDE/Debian distribution will install on a 192 mb RAM machine and it's pretty snappy on a 256 mb machine.

though such installations might be indicative

I got Peppermint OS, which is another LXDE/Ubuntu derivative to install and function on VB with 256mb RAM

I'll downloading the LXDE/Debian from your link to try it

letting it install it's desktop of choice (gnome), and then installing lxde via aptitude install lxde

With 256gb RAM debian installs (though the installation was a bit slow), and and it boots okay. The aptitude install lxde went through fine and produced a system booting to lxde

(I'd forgotten that for some reason I've always gotten a "Kernel failure" message box on the desktop whenever I've installed debian in virtual box, and here it is again. It was also a bit of a pain getting the Guest Additions to work: the pointer integration was very flakey at first, and I had to do some additional work to be able to obtain a usable virtual box installation)

It's based on Ubuntu but has a better looking menu and comes complete with all the goodies that under Ubuntu you wind up having to download anyway. It's the distro I keep on my thumb drive for emergencies and to rescue borked PCs. In fact, I just burned a bunch of Mint discs as stocking-stuffers for the family. I tell them even if they aren't interested in Linux to just keep it handy in the event of a system borking.

Linux Mint (32 bit) should run just fine on a P-III.

http://linuxmint.com

System Requirements:

System requirements:
* x86 processor (Linux Mint 32-bit works on both 32-bit and 64-bit processors).
* 512 MB of system memory (RAM)
* 4 GB of disk space for installation
* Graphics card capable of 800×600 resolution
* CD-ROM drive or USB port

The other thing I like about Mint is that they are keeping the Gnome desktop where Ubuntu is dropping Gnome for Unity which I don't care for as much. If you are coming from a Windows background, I think Gnome is easier to adapt to. With Gnome, you get two taskbars (panels), an upper and lower, but it's easy to fit everything you need on just one panel:



As you can see, I'm still running Ubuntu 10.04 on this box but I will probably switch to Mint at some point.

I've been running Mint in dual boot machines for several years and am using Mint 10 now. The Mint Update tool is worth it alone. I also keep a bootable Mint thumb drive for testing machines where I work (GParted, the disk partitioning tool, is another indispensable tool, although not limited to Mint).

is that they kept the software ratings which Ubuntu inexplicably dropped for some reason. Face it, with tens of thousands of free applications to choose from it's sometimes hard to pick just one. Being able to sort by ratings helps a lot.

I think I'm going to try Mint first since that has been the most recommended.

I've already found a home for the computer after I get it working, a young couple I know don't have any computer and I'm going to give it to them. I had to take the old OS (Win 95) off the machine because I told the person I got it from that I'd wipe the HD to make sure none of their information was left on it.

Your help is appreciated and I know the couple and their kids who are going to be eventually getting the box will be grateful also.

I would like to hear how it went.

Damn Small Linux seems to work OK and I'm trying out PCLinuxOS Gnome right now and it seems to be working..

If PCLinuxOS works like it appears it's going to I'll go ahead and install that since it has a lot more apps than DSL..

I've found that Knoppix seems to load and run as fast as DSL and is prettier/has a lot more functionality, so far I like Knoppix the best of what I have tried, it loads fairly quickly even off the live CD so I suspect it's going to be even faster when on the HD.

http://crunchbanglinux.org/

Crunchbang was ubuntu-based but has recently decided to backtrack in the direction of debian. The text-base installer is very simple to use

I got this to install in VirtualBox with only 64mb of virtual RAM

There's a post-installation script for updating and further installation (such as CUPS). Updating, of course, required a working internet connection. The post-installation script does different things depending on available memory: at 64mb RAM, the script didn't bother to ask if I wanted to install open office; at 128mb RAM, it gave me the option and installed it. Open Office does seem to install rather faster with 512mb RAM than with 128mb. With 128mb or more RAM, the post-installation script also offered an option to install openbox in addition to the xfce desktop I'd chosen, version control development tools (probably of no interest to your friends) and similar technical tools

Menus appear by right-clicking the desktop

64mb RAM doesn't give great performance but it might be usable for some purposes: I could web-browse and word-process and got gimp to work (virtual machine has 12mb of video memory). I never got the synaptic package manager to launch from the menu in any of these installs but terminal works; I could launch synaptic there by sudo synaptic and I installed tcsh in this fashion; sudo apt-get install devscripts seems to have worked, so presumably some packages can be installed through the terminal; aptitude seems preinstalled and runs from the terminal

On this Pentium III 700 MHz with 256 megs of RAM Knoppix boots to the desktop in about seventy seconds which includes the fifteen or twenty seconds it takes to boot up the Gateway BIOS..

Other than Damn Small Linux, which is pretty bare bones, that is by far the fastest bootup of any Linux I tried and I'm impressed with the performance on this old machine.

Knoppix also has Libre Office and some other appls so it's not exactly a stripped model.

Nothing warms the ol' cockles like seeing Linux resurrecting an old computer.

It was probably the RAM that kept Mint from loading - you need at least 512MB. Knoppix will run with as little as 32MB though 128MB is recommended.