A friend of mine is just beginning to learn linux, and I have set him up with Ubuntu for the time being. The problem is that he's only got a HP Pentium2 450Mhz with 96MB of RAM. I'm wondering what you guys would recommend trying distro wise? Ubuntu seemed very sluggish and I'm loathe to try fedora since it'll seem even laggier. I want to stay away from icewm and similar UI's because they really aren't very polished, and are quite confusing for new users. Any recommendations here?

Slackware or Debian would be good. To run a graphical environment though, 96MB of RAM is a bit low in my opinion, but minimalist window managers such as Fluxbox will work fiine.

Yes but these ain't for newbies!!!!
I rather recommend to get an 'old' version of redhat like 7.4 or 8

I think your best bet would be DamnSmallLinux.

Slackware might be a good choice to. I still contest the fact that it isn't for newbies. It's what I started with, left (check out new scenery), and went crawling back to.

Slack is not necessarily for pros. Vector Linux is another good distro. The only problem with using an old Redhat distro is that there are now no upgrades from Redhat and you may find it hard to install newer packages coz the distros will be quite dated.

I'd have to agree with the recommendation for Vector Linux.

Have a look at mine

http://featherweight.dangerousron.com

Ron

definately go with slack, trim the kernel. really a pentII 450 is not that slow of a pc. pick up a 64 mb RAM chip, remove the 32 to give you 128, you should be rockin. I run it on much slower than that and well. Slack isnt too hard. I think it is a good one to learn with, good resources out there too (here for example) Slack seems to keep stuff where the books say they are. Big thing is to stick with it, learn it.

my $0.02

Why not? You can check it out. I clicked on the website and seemed like a cool project for a noob distro. If you want a regular distro, I would highly recommend Slack. I don't agree that it is not for noobs. On the contrary I think it is perfect for noobs especially if there is someone to guide them. It is rock-solid and I think that's what impresses noobs the most. That is what I expected from Linux and that's what you get. I don't think your friend is going to have any problems, especially with you helping here and there. I would also recommend you telling him about this forum, this is the best place to learn linux. If you want, you can try the Cholesterol free environment http://www.xfce.org/
It comes on the Slack 10.0 CD, It is light and looks very cool, and it is going to be easy for a noob to pick it up, unlike blackbox IMHO. I also liked RH9 a lot, but I don't think that's a good idea for that Hardware

My $.02

Don't put KDE or Gnome on the machine , you'll make it sluggish and the guy will hate linux for being slow :-)