Selecting a distro for an ancient computer.
 

I've got this old computer. PII processor, 4gb HDD, I forget how much ram but the mobo is an AOpen AX63 pro ( http://www.motherboard.cz/mb/aopen/ax63p.htm )

The machine still runs great. I just finished cleaning all the connections with alcohol and putting the thing back together. I've got Ubuntu 5.10 on it right now, but with so little in the way of system resources, I want to get something more scaled down on there. Googling hasn't resulted in anything really useful.

So, does anybody know of a scaled down distro aimed at old computers? Obviously something current would be great (I considered trying to find a netbook distro and use that, but I don't know if there would be any issues using that kind of thing on a desktop.) but I'd be willing to use an older distro if I need to. I really just want to use it as a writing machine, with maybe some basic internet access.

Thanks in advance.

Tiny Me is probably the smallest with a gui and then would be puppy. They both need about 64 meg of ram to work well. Any of the distros can be down sized but I presume you want something to install without a lot of work.

You could install debian by command line.
Add lxde as the desktop.
Add alsa not pulse.
Don't use 3d graphics.


Or you can run any BSD install with two partitions: / at 3.6G and swap at 400M.

Run a basic window manager such as blacbox.

If you're going to run a browser then you will need to add something like noscript, flashblock, and/or adblock and edit about:config to be more secure along with preferences. Thi is for gecko type. Webkit browsers.. Hmmm...
I'd say kazahakase at the most. There is also dillo.

Xcd roast for burning. Don't use p2p clients. Pidgin for IM.

This has a floppy. You may want to use smartboot.

I'd probably just pick my favourite distro, do a minimal install and prevent unnecessary 'base' daemons from running. Most of the minimal custom build distro's are usually targeted at a specific set of people, security, forensics etc - by performing your own custom install you get exactly what you need.

cheers

I'd love to do a custom install, I've just been lazy enough in playing with Linux that I don't trust I'd be able to do it without a lot of bouncing back and forth between the project and asking questions on forums like this one. And I don't care enough about getting a 13 year old computer up and running to put that much time into it.

This has given me some good places to start though. Thanks so much =D

EDIT: TinyMe sounded best to me, but the only way to acquire it on their website which actually *works* is purchasing a disk. All the other links are broken, or link to something other than a download.