I need an extremely secure computer for what I am wanting to do. I learned real quick that no matter how much I rig up Windows it is still too big and too insecure. I have an old mini-itx motherboard that's running at 1GHz. I managed to scrounge around and get 512mb ram. I think my hard drive space is maxed out at 20Gb and that's gonna be pushing it. I tried running DamnSmallLinux on it. I'll give them credit for making something so small look so pretty, but I want something that's about the same on the GUI, but with more apps built in. I was hoping for something debian based because of the easibility of aptget. Any help guys?

I've got a machine with a 750MHz Athlon, 368MB, and two hard drives that equal 18GB. It runs Xubuntu fine. Its neighbor that is only slightly better at 1000MHz Athlon, 256MB, and two hard drives equaling 50GB dual boots Kubuntu and LFS. No problems.

Phhht - easy.
My crappy old PIII (666) laptop with 256Meg and 6 Gig of harddisk space runs the full blown Ubuntu.
Only used for mail and a bit of surfing, but it runs o.k.

FYI I run CentOS on a 400MHz 256MB PII just for fun. Don't run the GUI much, but it works. I know you don't want CentOS, but it's not exactly a small distro is my point

Well, I like the looks of Xubuntu. I'll have to wait to download it so my FAP will be up before I wake up. I'm planning on doing quite a bit with this little computer. Like I said, I need it extremely secure. To give you an idea, I'll be doing a little wardriving and a few other things.

freebsd on a pentium mmx 120mHz with 32 megs of ram and a 2 gig hd. Runs openbox, galeon, abiword, irssi, mplayer, pretty much 90% bash apps, but still works.

Your system specs ought to run a fedora installation just fine, even with KDE. Fedora incorporate the SELinux stuff...
Also check out http://www.bastille-linux.org/

Try these:

Kubuntu
http://www.kubuntu.org/

Mandriva
http://frontal2.mandriva.com/en/downloads/mirrors

PCLinuxOS .92
http://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/metalab/dist...glish/preview/
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/metalab/distr...glish/preview/

This is the distro I use and recommend, Why because it works right out of the box. No need to configure Everything, everything just works. It also comes as a 1 CD install that is a live CD that you can install later if you wish.

BeatrIX
http://www.watsky.net/download.html

Mephis
http://www.mepis.org/

Blag
http://www.blagblagblag.org/download/

Vector Linux 4.3
http://www.vectorlinux.com/

DSL
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Puppy Linux
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=3

Slackware
http://www.slackware.com/

SLAX Live CD
http://www.slax.org/

BeaFanatIX
http://bea.cabarel.com/

Elive:
http://www.elivecd.org/

Deli
http://delili.lens.hl-users.com/

That should run almost any Linux Distro you'd like to try. The severely bloated ones will be slower than normal (Mandriva, Linspire, in my experience).

I'd go with either Ubuntu or Xubuntu, only because I hate Kubuntu. . I'm having some hardware issues with my laptop which should be fixed this week, then I plan on putting Xubuntu on it(1ghz, 768mb RAM, 25gig hard drive)..

IGF

Similar story, PII 400 laptop, with 64Mb ram (could be 128Mb but I don't think so) with a 6G hard drive runs Ubuntu 6.06 with Gnome.

It might not be the fastest machine in the world, but it does run. Before Ubuntu, it had Slackware 10.2 & 11 installed with kde at different times for testing.

It doesn't sound like your system needs to secured, but everyone else should look out.
FYI, just be careful in probing other peoples systems, not legal in alot of jurisdictions.(sp.)