Do you have a link to a tutorial that goes in-depth on that?

Apropos old hardware. I tried to get our old 8086 computer running this holiday, but without luck. The motherboard didn't seem to work. So we took out the old harddrive (Of stunningly 5MB and giga size. About the size of 3 3.5" harddrives) and I tried reading it from a linux distro. The harddisk started but it diddn't work.
The next step was the floppys. Linux recognized the 5 1/4" floppy, but I got errors when I tried to mount it. Oh well.It was fun

</offtopic>

Depending what you need to do, you can those daemons. That doesn't affect online access, at least not in Mepis. Use command to find the PID's of the daemons.

I'm running Mepis 6.5, though ONLY to get online with Firefox, with a 2001 machine: About 1k Mhz, CD-ROM drive, Ethernet card, speakers, old LCD monitor, and 256RAM. Even uninstalled (no HD) and running from CD, I can sometimes use Kate or Kedit, as well as multiple instances of Firefox, plus Konsole. With very fast cable access, this works fine as an online-only machine. Can even watch a few youtube videos now and then. Is your machine older than this?

Mepis 6.5 can't run from an equally old Dell laptop I have, though, most probably because of insufficient RAM. If you can find a used-PC store, you might be able to scrounge RAM fairly cheaply. Otoh, once I accidentally left a USB key plugged into a PC when I tried to boot Mepis from it, and the system (from CD) told me it was going to use it as additional RAM, so you could try that -- probably $10 or less for at least another 512Mb.

FYI: I'm running Debian Sarge (atm) on a PII450 from 1998 with 384MB, even using GNOME. It's not exactly what you call snappy, but it's enough to use it every day as my main net machine. That said, I'm pretty sure that all specialised distros will do even better than Debian (at least as the default desktop package - that's what a typical new user will try to install). I still don't think that despite all the great steps forward that Debian has taken it can be called "newbie-friendly" (it's a great learning tool, but that's another story). So these are at least two reasons to stick to something a little more streamlined - like the distros the were mentioned at the beginning of this thread.

Considering what's considered "old" hardware, most "modern" distributions will probably run well on most machines labeled as such, but what RpgActioN says about his difficulties leads me to the conclusion that he's using "older" (than "old") boxes. He's fully right to do that, but he doesn't necessarily need to use old distributions (or versions of distributions, rather). I certainly don't, and I use even older (and surely crappier) boxes than the PII! One laptop (Celeron 300 Mendozino, 192MB RAM) runs Debian Etch - using GNOME's not recommendable, but with Fluxbox, it rocks!

M.