Good grief. We have someone requesting something easy for a noob and we have people suggesting Slackware and Gentoo.

Puppy is lightweight (<100MB) and runs very well as a live distribution--all in RAM. It provides a very good "test drive" without having to commit to an install. From there, you can decide if it is "fine" or "too Spartan." If you want something more "traditional," I think Xubuntu would run OK on such a machine, although you would need to use the "alternate install" CD due to the marginal RAM size (the weakest link IMO).

Thanks for your help . I've decided on a version of puppy that has xfce. It works pretty well, now that I've got the partitions sorted out

I'm attempting to set-up pretty much the same hardware as the original poster and am really struggling.

I have had a go at Gentoo, but twice it downloaded the stage three tarball (quite quickly as I have a fat pipe) but then took simply ages thrashing away at the HDD and once it had finished there was no sign of the damn tarball.

I then tried PCLinuxOS, which looks to me to be Mandriva (which I use on desktop and laptop) with all the options taken away on install. That was dog slow on a 600M Celeron. Utterly unusable; I'm surprised that Mandriva running KDE was recommended for old hardware.

I tried my old Mandriva 10 without KDE, but that just didn't want to work at all. (It simply wouldn't work with my plasma TV - I'm trying to set-up something to play AVIs and MPEGs so I don't have to keep hooking up the laptop).

I have tried Damn Small Linux which is promising as it runs nicely off CD (it looks very nice, plays mplayer from the command line (even if it is too slow to use)). It took three or four attempts at installing and messing around with fdisk before I could get it to book from HDD.

I have to say, DSL is the best of what I've tried so far, but is still incredibly slow. I would have expected a 600M celeron with 128M to be much faster than it is. I am beginning to suspect a problem with my hardware.

put more ram in that machine of yours and it will run anything from suse, fedora to puppy.
my p 3 800 mhz 1G ram runs suse and fedora at ease!!!!!
more ram is the way to go.
my conception of old hardware is something below 400 mhz 32 mb ram.

That processor is nice and fast, and 20gigs of RAM is plenty for any distribution. The only limitation is 128megs of RAM, which IS enough to run KDE on. I actually recommend you stick with KDE for now. Just yesterday, I was testing a 128meg stick of RAM, and was shocked to discover that my diskless workstation booted up all the way to a fully laden KDE desktop at 2048x1536 with no complaints whatsoever (I'm using Debian Etch, the current stable release).

This, despite the fact that my diskless workstation has no swap space and puts all temporary files and stuff in RAM. There are two lessons from this:

1. Debian is really quite efficient, and I think it's actually gotten more efficient in the last couple years.

and

2. KDE is getting more efficient. I'm not sure, but it "feels" less bloated than a year or two ago.

Now, if you really want to blaze away with 128megs of RAM, I suggest using Debian Etch with IceWM and pcmanfm for the file manager. If you use mostly gtk applications like gimp, abiword, gqview, and such, IceWM is unbeatable.

Just to add my experience over the last three days to this. I have tried Damn Small, Geexbox, Mandrake 10, PCLinuxOS and Mandriva 2007 (the latter not with KDE or Gnome). I did an absolute minimum install on Mandriva 2007 and then installed the apps I relly wanted. It was as fast as any of the others. In fact the only one of those to be slower than any of the others was PCLinux (probably because you can't configure it to not run with KDE).

The above's on a Celeron 600 with 128M of RAM.

man i use that config for my amd 166 mhz
this should rock on a P III

just about any
that's right just about any distro will run on this machine
I have a 600mhz running the latest slackware
and it out preforms a 1.2 ghz machine sitting right next to it running XP

I'd suggest Zen or DSL.. Vector had some weird troubles starting up with my almost identical toybox, otherwise it's perfect.

It is a very easy to install cut-down version of Slackware and it just works. I was able to install it and it runs great and with no problems. It took me only about 10 minutes to install and then even the movies worked on it. Nice distro to work with.