A suitablle linux for my old Latitude D800
 

I have an old latitude d800 laptop with a centrino 1.8 GHz processor , 512 MB ram, 60GB HD, and a simple nvidia 32 mb gpu. What distro can I run on it so that it may seve well as a backup PC?

Note: This Used to run Ubuntu 10.04 in all its glory. Though it was a bit slow.

With 512MB of RAM I recommend a more lightweight system, Gnome2/MATE, LXDE or XFCE would be fine on that system. Assuming that the Centrino 1.8GHz is actually a Pentium M you will need a distribution that comes with a kernel that does not have PAE enabled. I would give Fuduntu a try, or Debian.

Hi Nabeel, I'm running debian 6.0.7 on a compaq n600c 1.2ghz proc 512mb ram, 30gb hdd and it runs smooth. other than not being able to use compiz i have no complaints. i would agree with TobiSGD and check out xfce and lxde as they are lightweight.

well I was running Lubuntu on it. It does run fine BUT the nvidia graphics chip is one hell of a Pain in the *back. Its an old Geforce 4400 chip and sadly the opensource drivers don't work that well with it.

If it helps, I once put Linux Mint 9 lxde on my sister's aging P4, 1.6 GHZ, 256MB RAM with an ancient Nvidia gpu (~16MB) and it worked decent for like 2 years on moderate use.

I used to run PCLinuxOS once and if I recall they had pretty good support for Nvidia chips.

Regards.

Try Chrunchbang. Quite minimal, stable and fast. but also very functional.

I've tried PClinuxOs 2009 and that too wasn't helping with display either. My major problem is the dropping support of older nvidia cards by nvidia (96xx driver). I had this card running preety good with 9.10 , 10.04. but from 10.10 the problem begun. The proper driver for 10.10 was released in mid 2011. And since canonical has dropped support for the 10.04 i can't continue with that. I am running lubuntu 12.04 on it but the open nvidia driver isn't doing a good job. The videos run fine, I can browse the web on it but that's about it. the mouse pointer is distorted, the ltitle bars of windows are clutered. The pages in abiword are cluttered. so It preety much functions but not in the way it was with 10.04 installed.

Ubuntu seems to be better with modern computers, even if the GUI is changed.

For just 512MB, you could look at Fuduntu, Salix, or Vector.

As far as video support goes, I don't have practical experience (this computer only has motherboard video) but NVIDIA seems to have legacy drivers available and your chip is listed
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_32667.html
Alternatively, since you're not going to use this machine for gaming, couldn't you just use a VESA driver?

Might peek at distro's like slitaz or slax.

Might be easier to run almost any distro in vesa mode. Almost every card supports vesa.