I was kind of wondering if anyone had some advice on what would be the best way to get good performance out of an old HP 466 Celeron I recently obtained... Here are the specs:

Intel 810 series chipset (don't know which one exactly)
AC'97 audio
Intel PCI 3D graphics (4mb allocated from system RAM)
192 MB SDRAM
8.0GB HD
2x CD-ROM drive (don't laugh; it was the best I could do =) )
Realtek 10/100 ethernet card (don't remember which model)

Anyway, I was intending to set up this system for someone else, who does not have much linux experience, so I was wondering what would be the best performance setup, while still being user friendly? All the system really has to be capable of doing would be web-browsing, playing music and (perhaps) video files, and doing word processing and some spreadsheets (I'm thinking openoffice for this). Also, the possibility of adding a cd-rw drive in the future and having capability for that would be nice, if at all possible.
As far as distros go, I was thinking of perhaps Gentoo, because its (generally) superior peformance to fedora or mandrake, since I will probably be needing any performance boost I can get. However, does anyone think that it would be more worth it to sacrafice performance with a slightly more user-friendly distro, such as mandrake?
In addition, I need to pick which window manager to use for this box, but I'm thinking that either KDE or GNOME would be a better choice for useability. Which one would give better performance out of the two? Or which one would be more user friendly to a beginner?

--Thanx for any help!

Your rig isn't exactly the latest and greatest, but at the same time it's not all that shabby either, so I would say that pretty much any distro would be OK, although as you already know the overall performance is not going to be blazing fast.

If the person using this machine is a Linux newbie, then I would be much more concerned that ease of use be treated as the #1 consideration rather than performance. After all, a perfectly optimized, speedy system isn't much good if the user can't figure out how to do simple tasks and ends up getting seriously frustrated. I'd say go with you instincts as to which distro might best fit your friend's needs and preferences. As for the desktop envirnoment, both KDE and Gnome are pretty power-hungry, so you may need to go with a lighter one. Good luck with it regardless of the decision you make -- J.W.

I would say KDE and cut out of a lot of CPU heavy stuff, or Gnome. How for a more windows feel than fluxbox or enlightenment I would say IceWM

If you want a decent compromise between usability (point and drool ) and performance I suggest XFCE4. It uses GTK2 but still manages to be not godawful slow. Plus it's usually very pretty.


Håkan