Looking for Linux distro advice
 

Hello all,

I just inherited my neighbor's clunker box. The PC has the following:
- P4 (Northwood) 2.4Ghz CPU
- 1GB of RAM
- Nvidia GeForce2 MX/MX 400 video card
- 180GB hard drive (IDE)
- USB 2.0 and Firewire
- CD Burner
- DVDROM drive
- floppy drive (yep this box is old)
- Broadcom 440x 10/100 on-board Ethernet adapter
- on-board AC97 audio support
- Asus motherboard

I plan on learning Linux on it and use it to get up to speed with programming (C, C++, Java, XML, HTML, JavaScript, other web stuff, database programming, command line scripting, etc.), networking stuff, and have some fun (listen to music, watch DVDs, play games that the box can handle). I don't have money to spend on upgrades for it so, for now it will remain in the as-is state.

Is there a Linux distribution that would be best suited to learning the OS, programming, and networking? I suspect that the three goals listed above might be conflicting in certain ways. Any other advice for a tech savvy Linux newbie?

Thanks in advance.

Edit: my bad... I intended to post this in the distro forum. As newbie questions go my questions are probably annoying to some. Just point me in the right direction. The sooner I get up to speed the sooner I can possibly contribute to the Linux Questions community.

With a machine like that and your goals it seems to me a perfect candidate for Slackware (may be using XFCE, if KDE is not fast enough). Not easy to begin with, but you will learn a lot, it comes with programming tools, libraries and programs you need for different kind of servers (Apache, MySQL, ...) by default.

Pentium 4 machines are workhorses. :) You can run any distro you like on that hardware.

Here's a good comparison of the top 10: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

if it's your first time using linux i would recommend linux mint. It's based on ubuntu. you can learn a lot from it. i think that meets the system requirements exactly dead on. once you've gotten used to it you could move on to more difficult distros.

Many thanks guys. I'll grab slack and Ubuntu since I have enough drive space.

@Snowpine: The link to the Top 10, in review format with Pros and Cons, helped a lot.