i have a old power Spec 4410
it's a p6set-ml board with onboard lan, sound, and vga
P3 550 proc.
288 meg's of ram
<OB> Cmi8738 sound
<OB> Sis 620 Vga
<OB> DAVICOM 9102 LAN
Sound blaster CT4830

what i want the box to do is Run Gaim, Azureus, Teamspeak play Mp3's and web surf a little is that asking too much ?

So my first question is what distro Should i use i really dont want just a command line i would like a GUI but it does not have to be pretty i'm more intrested in it working well

the second thing is i have 2 sound card's because i want the mp3's to play on my stero and not on the headset i use for Teamspeak where should i look for the drivers for the ct4830 ?

i have the drivers for the CMI the SIS And the Lan

well thanks any commant's are welcome

Try VectorLinux I have had great luck with it.

suse fedora and gentoo using fluxbox would run nicely.

fluxbox is so light on the system comapred to KDE or gnome

Fedora i find is ok on the system if you dont put the whole damned thing in, lol.

suse 9.3 would also be good, it is fairly new but still like old hardware, 10 might be a bit much.

gentoo with its oh so soft packages and creamy stability is ok, but a annoyance to set up at times.

at any rate, think fluxbox or blackbox for simple and fast GUI.

as for drivers, i dont got a clue.

Try Fedora, it's got some good hardware detection. As augurseer said, don't install the whole thing, it's HUGE! Only one problem, you'll have to look for the Fedora MP3 packages, MP3 support doesn't come default.

if you add a good package manager like apt you can then find mp3 and mpeg support for everything. look for XINE, it is a audio and video decodeing program and video and DVD plaback utility and it works great.

Archlinux has a very good package manager called pacman. you might want to look into that

I tried out Vector on a 466 with 128mb and it ran pretty fast using fluxbox. I only gave it a quick test of a few days to see what was up with Vector but I was impressed.

well i'm trying Gentoo and going to use Fluxbox i'm working thru it now i'll run it for a month and see how it goes's and how much hair i loose