Looking to make a few linux computers as I have a few 500-1000mhz machines collecting dust. Tried several of the live cds still unsure as to which ones are best for limited resources.

Which distributions/software should fit these ideas.
Looking to build 3 seperate machines. As doing each task would problably tax any one of the systems.

1. Looking for one machine to do burning of audio and some light audio editing. Mainly volume changes and splits. (1000mhz and 128 megs sdram
1 mem banks dead)

2. Looking for one machine for gaming and eductional software DosBox,emulators,and Wine. Very new to installing progams on linux.

3. Video and audio player

for old PCs i recommend using something with a 2.4.xx kernel like Slackware-11 which is still supported, and for the oldest of the old (ancient) i would suggest DeLi (desktop Linux Lite) http://delili.lens.hl-users.com/

I've had success with Ubuntu and a 2.6 kernel on a 650 MHz machine. If you are new to installing software than a Ubuntu based distro would be good for you since you can use the package manager to download and install the software for you. The live cd will run slow... no doubt about that, but once you get it installed to the hard drive it should run better.

Damn Small Linux (DSL)
Puppy Linux
Xubuntu
Slackware

For your first objective (audio burning/editing), you could use even older hardware if you use a command-line sans GUI.

For your second, that depends on the games.

For three, I'd try something like Puppy or Slackware with XFCE.

By the way...the distros listed above are in no particular order.

Hi,
The clock speed doesn't really help us. What are the processors families? If i86 class then the Intel processors will handle the current kernels. It will be the legacy hardware support on each machine that will decide what you can actually use.

You say that you tried several Livecd distributions. What was the result for each machine?