Is there a Linux distro meant to cater to digital photography? I have a copy of GrafPup but I am not too keen on it. I have done a ton of searching and the best I've found is Ubuntu Studio. I was considering using a fully-customizable distro like Lunar Linux and making a light, snappy photo processing machine, but I don't think I am skilled or knowledgeable enough to accomplish much with Lunar. Any suggestions? I really want to be able to run Bibble, blueMarine, or Lightzone with normal speed (my machine is a pentium III, so it's slow in Ubuntu) and dedicate my machine to this task.

It sounds like all you need to do is install a relatively lean configuration of Debian (say, using FluxBox for very low overhead). You can get the ease of installation you have in Ubuntu, but without all the bloat.

In the same vein, you could just use Xubuntu as well, or use a lighter VM in Ubuntu and disable things you don't need.

I was considering either normal Ubuntu with fluxbox or going with fluxbuntu but I don't know how well-supported it is. their website doesn't exactly inspire me to jump on their bandwagon...

I unfortunately can't afford much in the way of a graphics card at the moment so I scraped together 500M of RAM and a couple gigs of swap partition in the hopes of helping it along. So I guess I'll go in the direction of lightweight window managers.

Great for photographers:

http://www.dfpe.pclinuxos.nl/

a remaster of pclinuxos