Hello I am very new to Linux. I have an old sony vaio with a Pentium 3 and 512 RAM. I would like to serve websites and manage my home net with it but I have no idea which distribution to use. Any suggestions?
-Thanks

Well, a beginner distro would be best, but really for a server you want to avoid the load that using X (the Windows manager- ie; what the GUI stuff sits on) put on. A server may not be the best thing to do when new to linux, y'know.

Saying that, I would recommend Debian for this, but thats just me; your best bet is to try a few and see which one really speaks to you. I would, however, recommend using Linux as your normal OS for a bit first, just to get your eye in.

I concur with jamescondron; a selection of distro's should be used to figure out which one is best for you, then concentrate on that one to learn it.

Basically it comes down to what kind of computer user you want to be?

Normal/casual PC users don't know the ins/outs of either windows or Linux,
While more ambitious types seek to know the "Why"s and "How"s of a Operating system.

If you are ambitious then try several distro's; I recommend USB distro's if possible to save CD's, but CD/DVD's work good too.

You could try some multidistro stuff at my site and check out differing distro's.

Before really suggesting a distro though, how big is your Harddrive?
If big enough 8-10Gb then go with a major distro like Xubuntu/Debian(as jamescondron said)
While if you have a smallish HD maybe Tinycore/Zenwalk, etc

How "new" is new to Linux?
Do you know the terminal?
How much experience with Windows?

512 RAM is limited for a server.
I would suggest to add some RAM
Like jamescondron said, debian is your best choice.

sriousman,

If you are ready for some serious learning then Gentoo can do what you want on that hardware.
You will not have Xorg - No graphical user interface.

Gentoo takes longer to install than most as it provides all the tools you need to build your own custom distro, which is effectively what you do. The stage3 tarball provides what you must have, where there are no choices. From then on you only get what you ask for and the required dependancies, which get in source code form and compile to suit your needs and system.

Gentoo is not for someone who wants a point and click install, then 'just use it' its not for users who do not want to learn about how things work either.

Gentoo as a first distribution? Sorry, but thats a terrible idea. make.conf? building own kernel? headless server? Those are not things you tackle first time out.

And the build time on a p3? A base system alone is going to take a day or two if I remember doing the same on a p3. The OP has no experience either, so this is certainly not the way to go.

For server duty I usually recommend Centos. It is RHEL(Red Hat Enterprise Linux) with the logos removed. Any book/information on RHEL is also applicable to Centos. Centos is free to download/update (unlike RHEL) and has a five year support life. I run Centos5.3 on my 1ghz PIII media server with 512MB ram without any issue (including using the GUI).

By new I mean I have messed with ubuntu a little but would rather not use a GUI. I don't know any terminal or commands for windows or Linux. So I guess I am looking for a good distro to learn using my system.

Centos will be fine, comes with a GUI, but you can just open xterms as you want as well.
The RUTE tutorial is very good for Linux generally: http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
Over here (www.linuxtopia.org) is all the docs you could want; ok maybe not ALL, but a lot!