I am having an old p3 pc with 2x128 mb ram and 8 gb hard disk.
this is just spare machine to play with.
I installed Ubuntu 10.04 on it but it's performane was not satisfactory.
I wan't to Know which distribution will work right on such low hardware
with graphical user interface.
Or should i use this pc in think client,if yse than in which distribution for think client(eg: red hat) will perform well on it.

A few suggestions:

Puppy, SliTaz, AntiX, CrunchBang

http://kmandla.wordpress.com

imho even ubuntu can.. KDE 3.1 ,XFCE or LXDE desktop and maybe some custom kernel compile will do the job.
But you need 'light' apps for general use..
try SLAX from slax.org KDE 3.1 and very flexible apps collection.

We have a similar processor, two Pentium lll's on an Asus P2BD board. I maxed the RAM to 1GB and tried installing various distros on it with no success until I installed Puppy Wary on it. Serfing the internet was sometimes slow, but otherwise the programs work in it. From what I hear, this board was a one-off with this two separate processor setup, so it isn't the easiest to work with and was originally made for W98 I believe.
Edit: I just removed the added USB 4 port card and old network card. Internet browsing speed is faster running Wary from RAM.

Any distribution with a lightweight desktop environment (XFCE, LXDE, Enlightenment, Trinity) or one of the many window managers (one of the *boxes, IceWM, JWM, PekWM, one of the tiling WMs) will run on that machine. I wouldn't recommend to use KDE 3.x, it is unsupported and gets no bugfixes or security updates (if you don't use it in a LTS distro), use trinity instead.
So any of the all purpose distros will work, if you choose the desktop environment right, or you use a distro for older computers, like antiX, Vector, Zenwalk, Crunchbang, Lubuntu (or Xubuntu), ConnochaetOS, wattOS, ... .

I have a fair deal of experience with old computers, and I can tell you that linux can work well on that computer, you just need the right setup. Heh heh. I recommend Debian, with XFCE (or openbox, icewm, fluxbox, or something). install it, then install sysv-rc-conf and use it to disable the useless services that are enabled by default, like bluetooth (can't imagine you'd use that with such an old computer) exim4 (who needs it) the kernel log things (can't imagine that you'd need these) and cron/anacron/atd (PENIS) and do a whole bunch of stuff like that. I got debian running quite nicely on an old laptop with 128mb ram this way.

Hope this helps.

Is this a subliminal "Penis"?

Boys, boys...

I've run Linux on Pentium-III without difficulty. The only important thing is to configure the kernel with the appropriate CPU-type selection. Then, be absolutely certain that the entire kernel and every loadable module is recompiled properly.

My experience with "older, slower machines" is usually that the I/O subsystem settings are inappropriate. The problem, in other words, is not that the CPU is slow, but rather, that the kernel is expecting the I/O hardware to be more capable than it actually is. It is very important to make the appropriate selections because, in early machines like these, automatic hardware-sensing capability might not have been invented yet.

You almost-certainly will need to build a custom kernel when dealing with older machines. You might also find that many binary packages are unsuitable: package-builders have to shoot for "the most-common least common denominator," so to speak, and that's probably not Pentium-III anymore. (Consider using the Gentoo distribution ... it's a bit of a learning curve, but I've still got a Pentium-early class machine that still runs like a bat out o' hell. Gentoo allows you to be very precise, ummm, because you have to be.)

What do you mean with this?

Most distros 32 bit versions are compiled to run on a 486, but are optimized for i686 architecture, which was invented with the Pentium Pro. Even the ones that are compiled for i686 and higher (like Arch) will run without any problems on a Pentium 3.

Hi,
I recently got an old PII 450MHz and 64MB RAM. I tried Slackware and Damn Small linux on it. Both run very nicely on the machine with fluxbox or enlightenment 16. Kde 3.5.9 was working as well, but it was not very fast.

thanx all of u for u r help.
i have tried puppy linux 5 it is impressive but i am thinking to explore more possibilities to come up with the best i am thinking to try lubuntu on it or i should build linux from scratch on it for best reesults.

Lubuntu will give you the same features as Ubuntu, except with LXDE desktop (lxde.org) instead of Gnome desktop. If you were happy overall with Ubuntu, but found performance unsatisfactory, maybe switching to a lightweight desktop can give a performance boost.

I have not tried linux from scratch personally; I hear it is a more involved and time consuming project compared with installing Lubuntu, Puppy, CrunchBang, etc.

You might want to look at Tiny Core (under 10 meg).

I have a pIII with 256 MB Ram that runs Linux just fine. I have run of CentOS 5.x and Slackware 13.x on it recently just fine. Gnome or KDE take a long while to load; if I were going to use it long term, as opposed to for distro-hopping, I would follow the advice that others have given to use a window manager such as Fluxbox or a very light weight desktop environment such as LXDE.

Some contemporary applications will be a little slow because application versions expand to fill the available memory. But if your goal is to experiment, that machine should meet your needs.

Back when I had 256MB of ram on my IBM A22m Laptop (I have since bumped it up to 512MB of ram)

AntiX runs great on this laptop. If you do have a i486 laptop. AntiX comes with a i486 kernel and iso version for that model also.i686 is Based on Debian Testing. i486 I think is based on Debian Stable (Squeeze)

http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

http://distro.ibiblio.org/mepis/released/antix/