PC specs:
128 mb ram
997 MHz pentium III
20 gb hdd
32 mb of mem on the graphics card (I think)

What I'm looking for:
Something light, fast.
Must be easy for a noob (me)
Must have nice looking window manager. I know KDE would probably be too much for the system, would XFCE 4.4 be good?
Part of what I'm looking for in a window manager is a nice file explorer. I like how konqurer works (used it in knoppix on a better system).

I'm considering xbuntu. would that be good.

There are many to choose from, and I think it's best that you spend some time investigating what feels right to you. Picking a distro is a philosophical and personal choice. All you can get here is people advertising their favorites. None is distinctively superior to the others in any technical sense.

Here is a starter list. When one looks interesting, check out the home page. Also search these forums for "light distro" or "old computer." This question has been asked many many times, and all the answers are already posted.

any distro you want will run on that, but as per your request for light distros:

Distros for older Hardware:

Vector Linux
http://www.vectorlinux.com/

DSL
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Puppy Linux
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=3

Slackware
http://www.slackware.com/

SLAX Live CD
http://www.slax.org/

BeaFanatIX
http://bea.cabarel.com/

Elive:
http://www.elivecd.org/

Deli
http://delili.lens.hl-users.com/

Luit Linux
http://luitlinux.sarovar.org/


you might also want to consider:

Kubuntu
http://www.kubuntu.org/


Mandriva
http://www.mandriva.com/community/mandrivaone


PCLinuxOS .92
http://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/metalab/dist...glish/preview/
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/metalab/distr...glish/preview/

This is the distro I use and recommend, Why because it works right out of the box. No need to configure Everything, everything just works. It also comes as a 1 CD install that is a live CD that you can install later if you wish.

Mephis
http://www.mepis.org/

Blag
http://www.blagblagblag.org/download/

if your still unsure of the distro, and need more help try these distro choosers

http://eedok.voidofmind.com/linux/chooser.html
http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/
http://polishlinux.org/choose/quiz/
http://desktoplinuxathome.com/distro.html

Most popular and easy to use is DSL http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Personally, I'm VERY fond of KateOS. It's got the Polish polish.

Truthfully, it has its problems and is enough of a niche player to not get good advice for. But, it's got a great packaging system - based off of Slackware with just that little bit extra. The most annoying thing (for me) is that the default X11 config can be flaky.

You can very easily get a lightweight ROX + IceWM system running, if you aren't afraid of the terminal. [Heck, even if you are, the latest version has a nice graphical package manager.]

So, I'd say to get KateOS a try, just because it could use more popularity. And because it comes with a "proper" [read: unmodified] XFce, KDE, and GNOME.

I am not sure why people would suggest distros like Kubuntu, Mandriva, Slackware ... when you are a noob and looking for something "light and fast".

Puppy is your best bet. It runs from RAM so you will find it super-fast.
Slax is your second option but 128Mb could be a struggle. Check on slax.org to check first.

Slackware is very fast on my P3 1.0Ghz
Slackware was the first distro i have tried, meaning first experience with *nix

You could build yourself a tiny distro with Gentoo. I recommend this.

You could also use SAM Linux 2007 (beware, QT apps don't work with it yet, he's missing libraries and stuff) or bite the bullet and get the full PCLinuxOS which has a complete KDE environment.

Nice computer! I don't think you need to run any special lightweight linux distro's at all.

If I were you I'd put on arch linux. http://www.archlinux.org/

More importantly I wouldn't use gnome, kde or xfce. But I'm sure you can run them, if you get rid of the bells and whistles. I just wouldn't have the patience to do so, I want it to be fast.

So I'd put on Icewm with the ubuntu theme. It looks good: http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure/screenshot2.png

And is very very fast. It does have a good amount of features as well (ctrl+alt+space command line, etc). Use menumaker to make the menu. You can install the icewm control panel (in arch: icewm-utils) .

Openbox + pypanel is another wm which is very good looking and quite fast.

Use idesk (or similar) if you want desktop icons.

As for a file manager you can pick any you want, but I'd use emelfm and mc. I guess a nice lookin quite fast file manager would be pacmanfm, or rox.


Some links:
http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure/tech/lightdesktop.html
http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure/tech/linux/apps.html

greetings, gunnix

gunnix
QUOTE - "if you get rid of the bells and whistles. I just wouldn't have the patience to do so, I want it to be fast."

So which live 'copy2ram' distro do you use? I assume you must use a 'copy2ram' distro based on your comment above?

hehe, don't have enough ram for that

I have a PIII laptop that doesn't boot from CDROM and I had hoped to build a commandline only system (using Gentoo preferably), with python, perl, some wireless apps, and lynx. I was reading various posts and it seemed like this wasn't very feasible. What would you recommend?

You can do it without CDRom...

If you already have Linux, you can build Gentoo inside another linux distro. If your PC can boot from a USB stick, put PCLinuxOS on the USB stick and use the live environment to build a full Gentoo system per the instructions of the handbook. That's what I do, anyway.

Don't think it's been mentioned yet, but Zenwalk would meet your criteria, it is based on Slackware and uses the XFCE window manager. Runs happily on older hardware and is easy to customise via the netpkg package management.

www.zenwalk.org

But KateOS is a better Zenwalk than Zenwalk. Unless you hate choices, then Zenwalk is your cup of tea, and only for the fact that it's chosen everything for you.