zablas,

Whilst you may get Linux Mint Xfce to run on your machine, in my opinion antiX-16 (32 bit) would be far more suitable because it is a much lighter Linux distro and it is specifically designed for old low-powered computers such as your's.

Extract from antiX FAQs:

Instead of a heavy common Desktop Environment, antiX uses window managers to control what the end-user can see and do.

antiX comes in three flavours for 32 and 64 bit boxes. antiX comes as a full distro (<700MB), a base distro (c520MB) and a core distro (<200MB) all with a kernel that will boot "antique" PII, PIII computers as well as the latest "modern" processors.

By default, antiX loads into a Rox-IceWM desktop (antiX-base into a Rox-fluxbox desktop) with a few icons on the desktop. Use F6 at the boot menu screen to choose your desktop. What you choose running live will automatically transfer if/when installed.

antiX is a very flexible linux distribution. You can run it live from a cd, live from a usb stick (with persistence i.e. changes are saved on reboot) as well as setting up a frugal-install from an internal or external hard drive. Of course, you can install to internal and external drives, sticks, cards etc. You can even run it live, add/remove applications, customize it, remaster it and then install. All your changes will carry over to install!

antiX can be used as a rolling release distro (i.e. you should be able to keep your applications up to date by regularly upgrading).

Full details here:
http://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/...FAQ/index.html

Not since version 12 it doesn't, not out of the box anyway. You could always add LXDE to one of the standard releases but it's probably better to keep things simpler to start out with. So, for Mint, there are two lighterweight options: (i) Mint MATE 18.1, (ii) Mint Xfce 18, and then upgrade to 18.1 when it comes out of beta (which it will be doing very shortly).

This is definitely a case for running various live distros off a boot stick/CD/DVD (say Mint MATE, Mint Xfce, Lubuntu, MX16/Anti-X?) in order for the OP to see what the hardware can handle and what he/she prefers as regards usability and looks.

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And check out the following side: http://distrowatch.com/

If you would like an even lighter graphical interface, you could consider skipping the desktop environment completely and just running a window manager by itself. They're harder to customize, but much, much faster and lighter.

Thanks for putting me straight -- with the codenames used I'd not realised the LXDE version I found was out of date. I wouldn't think just "sudo apt-get install lxde" will be too much trouble though. I like the idea of USB "try before you buy" but my experience of it is that using a live image means no easy way of installing drivers or applications together with using most of your RAM for the file system or installing to USB then waiting an age for the slow flash memory. All in I'd just install a distro, play with it, get fed up then install another until I were happy.

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Any distro would be fine as long as you are using a lightweight desktop environment as well as lightweight applications. LXDE, XFCE and Mate would be fine. When you get comfortable with Linux you may be interested in CentOS as Debian and Ubuntu are dropping support for 32bit soon. CentOS has already dropped 32bit support for their latest version (7) but you can still use CentOS 6 for a while.