Hi,

I have an old PIII 450 MHz (Katmai) with win98SE installed.

The pc has a DS-XG YMF470 PCI Yamaha sound card, and an ATI Rage XL PCI Video card

I had loaded ubuntu 9.10 at first. The installation went fine except that there is no sound at all.

Also, ubuntu 9.10 is too heavy for that PC.

Can anyone suggest a distro that is user friendly, and will run reasonably well on this pc ?

I really want my children to learn Linux.

I have ubuntu 9.10 on my C2D, and it seems to be running fine.

Thank you.

You've omitted perhaps the most important factor: How much memory do you have?

Oh sorry.

The pc has 768 MB SDRAM.

My Pentium 3 laptops are currently running: CrunchBang, AntiX, CentOS.

I am not familiar with that sound card, sorry.

That much RAM should be plenty for any distro. (I presume some was added after the PC was made).

I'm not sure about the sound. You made find it a case of trying distros until you find one that gives working sound.

You could try Vector Linux Light. Not the easiest of installations, though not involved either. (You'll need to know about partitioning). But it runs very well on old hardware and includes good configuration tools.

Yes, most of the RAM was added later. The default was 128 MB.

I am conversant with using Gparted, so partitioning won't be a problem.

The kids are used to MS Windows, so a GUI would help in a smooth take off.

Then, I would like to bring then to the command line.

have a look at xfce as a DE instead of gnome or KDE. This may speed things up a bit. However with what RAM you have, you shouldn't have any problems running any distro. Just remember that with a 450 MHz PC, things ARE going to be slow no matter what you run. Linux has become a very modern OS and to run all the bells and whistles that are offered will probably need a faster CPU... Yes Linux can run just fine on a 486, but having it run a modern gnome desktop is probably out of the question So keep in mind what specs you have and adjust as needed. If you still have ubuntu installed

I would add to the above that if you really want a simple, clean and fast DE/WM, you can try Fluxbox. Very easy to configure and it's quite intuitive as well. Requires almost no memory.