I have a friend with an older machine (PIII 600, 256 M Ram, etc.) and I installed Slackware 10.2 and set it up for them, but now they want to use their USB camera on it. I would set it up for them, but I live far away and I don't have time to provide 24/7 support for them. So what's the best distro for this type of machine that I can install and hopefully forget about? Which would be the easiest for this situation, (USB devices, winmodem + dialup, computer noobs) Ubuntu?

That's not too underpowered. I'd suggest either Xubuntu (Ubuntu's version for lower resource pc's with an xfce desktop instead of Gnome or KDE) or Debian itself. If Debian, you could even try the full Gnome Desktop and see if the performance is okay. But Debian also has XFCE if necessary, just not as many GUI tools on XFCE as in Gnome. I don't think KDE is in the picture as it needs a bit more oomph than that computer has these days.

Less of a learning curve and more GUI tools in Xubuntu, but then again easier to configure Debian if the GUI tools don't cut it.

Thanks for the quick response dahveed3, I'll try Xubuntu and see how they like it.

You might also want to have a look at antix.mepis... Version 7 is not far off... current version is good!

Very small should run quickly, and a good usb dazzel for their camera memory card... Takes the camera out of the picture...

JR

You don't need to worry about a light-weight distro really, I have ran ubuntu and fedora on my p3 with 256 mb of ram, and they ran ok, with gnome even.

Well I have a Ubuntu 7.10 so I'll just run it live and see how it works, but I'll be bringing a Xubuntu backup cd in case. Thanks for all the replies, I'll let you know how it works.