Someone, please post a link to a tutorial for Gnome and for KDE.
I use Windows XP and would like to put some distribution on an
older 750KHz AMD K machine with 512 MB RAM, to (re)learn Linux.

Hi and sorry.Im not gonna post any links to tutorials.What I'm gonna say is that both my kids switched from XP a few years ago.My 10 year old son uses Linux Mint with Gnome and my 16 year old daughter uses Slackware with Kde.None of them needed any tutorials.They found their way around by exploring and clicking to see what happened.

Gnome: http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/GNOME.html

KDE: http://linux.about.com/od/linux101/a/desktop14.htm

Generally, I prefer KDE apps to Gnome apps, though I do like Totem (the Gnome media player). I have both Gnome and KDE installed on my computers for the libraries, but I use Fluxbox as a window manager.

For something lighter weight than either Gnome or KDE, but that is still a desktop environment rather than a simple window manager, consider XFCE. It comes with Slackware and is in the software repositories for most major Linux distributions.

I think that KDE 4 will have trouble on that box as an interface--it's more resource intensive than I like--but you can run KDE apps under Gnome and vice versa (or under Fluxbox or any other window manager) as long as the libraries are in place. (Think of "libraries" as functionally sort of like Windows *.dll files--they are shared by multiple applications.)

For example, two of my computers came with Gnome on top of Ubuntu. I downloaded KDE to have the KDE libraries, but almost never use either the KDE or the Gnome interfaces.

What this ignores is the fact that a 10 year old and a 16 year old will learn to use what ever is out there in no time, while a 73 year old (me) will flounder at the easiest OS available. I have trouble with Windows. (Who doesn't?)
Thanks to the next poster who did post links to tutorials.

David Teague
born in 1937

Thanks to Frank Bell for the links to tutorials and suggestions.
--DBTsr

You are most welcome.

And welcome to the wonderful world of free and open source.