I have a couple of old P3 machines that run great on small distros like Slax, but many of these small OS's are only designed to boot from pen drives and so on. Does anyone know of a small KDE distro that can be installed and updated? Thanks.

You can do a net install of Debian and get a pretty minimal installation.

Sorry, what is a net install? I'm somewhat new to Linux. Thanks.

you basically download all the packages from the internet instead of having them all on a cd

A Net install (also network install) is an installation that takes place over a network. I've used the net install to install distros over the internet.

The term small is also a little ambiguous. Do you mean that the installation medium that you download is small or do you mean the size that it takes up on the hard drive?

If it's download size you are concerned about a network install is ideal because you only download the packages that you need and you can really slim down the amount of data downloaded this way.

If you are concerned about the size it take on the hard drive thats another matter. If you looking for distos that have a small efficient install look towards DSL (Damn Small Linux), Debain, and Slackware. to name just a few.

Please clarify and I hope this helps

Yeah, I meant small install on my hdd. I tried Slax which is only 200 megs and ran really well on my older systems, but modifying it to install rather than just a live cd proved too difficult. Thanks.

I think it's unlikely that you can install a usable full desktop system on a HD smaller than about 5 GB, and you need at least 32 MB of ram.

Even then, unless you know what you're doing it'll be pretty slow.