ok, I just received an old IBM Thinkpad with a P1, 512mb hd(yeah...) and 128 ram. I've tried Feather and DSL, but wanted to see my other options... I'd like to stay within the Debian or Ubuntu families. would Xubuntu run on a system this slow? Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks.

Puppy linux, SLAX popcorn, I think you would need more hdd room to run Xubuntu

For Xubuntu;

To run the Desktop CD (LiveCD + Install CD), you need 128 MB RAM to run or 192 MB RAM to install. The Alternate Install CD only required you to have 64 MB RAM.

To install Xubuntu, you need 1.5 GB of free space on your hard disk.

Once installed, Xubuntu can run with 64 MB RAM, but it is strongly recommended to use at least 128 MB RAM.

(from http://www.xubuntu.org/get)

So no you can't install xubuntu since you don't have enough disk splace

(JUST A GUESS) but i wonder if you can get say a 2gb memory disk and install it onto there...

[EDIT] i just realised it may not even have usb

DSL is another popular lite distro.

yeah, that was my thought was a 2 or 4 gb usb drive, but it doesn't have usb at all...

How good is slax in terms of hardware detection? I'm just trying to avoid spending any money on this machine. I'm trying to build this for a friend who does't own a computer. I've ebayed a little and found some bigger ram and a 20gb hd for reasonable prices. But as I said, I'm trying to avoid this. The machine does however have a PCMCIA card slot. How well does Linux support the PCMCIA to USB/Firewire cards?

ArchLinux is a very good choice if you are not afraid to start from the command line.
You can install just the packages you need with the excelent packagemanager 'pacman', no install from source needed and the total Mb's will be very small.

If you download the somewhat bigger iso you should be able to avoid the "terminal only" scenario and have X installed directly as well.

Deli is supposed to be very good ... Also check this list ...
DistroWatch, Old Computers Search.

I have heard good things about Deli on older computers

I was trying Feather for awhile, it's quite nice. I'd also recommend you try Wolvix; although I've not tried it myself, it looked quite promising, and is based on XFce/Fluxbox. 512 Mb seems like a really small disk, so if you're not likely to get much use of out it anyway, you could try a base Slackware install and have all CLI fun you can stomach.

Read OP's specs again. No way Arch will run on a P1, the distro is i686 optimized.

Disclaimer: I am a huge Arch supporter and run it on all machines at home and work.

Ahhh, numbers schnumbers. 1, 2, 3... what's the big difference anyway
No, seriously, I missed that. Good to see others are on top of things!

_________________

if you want a debian based light distro thats proven, you probably want to go with DSL. you _could_ go with a server install of a *buntu distro, but that bloat-erific distro is likely not the way to go.

if you install DSL, you can just enable dpkg, deinstall all the stuff they have on there and start from a pretty much bare installtion, which is always a blast. Then you can install whatever you want and make sure this machine only has what you want/need, to optimise space and memory.

if you want some hardcore optimisations, you could conmpile a gentoo installation on a seperate machine, then move it to the laptop.

or, you could just go with freebsd

ok, I installed slax and it seems to be running great. Thank you for all your recomendations.