Hi guys

Can anyone tell me which distro would be best to install on pc clients
with following specs :

AMD K6-II 500Mhz
64Mb SDRAM
4Gb HDD
Onboard VGA (shared memory) & SC
NIC RealTek

Of course I need those pc to run with GUI which is perhaps the problem
on such thin spec. I'm considering MDK 8.2 but perhaps there is better
option.

Aplications needed to run on these computers include word and spredsheet processors that can read and write doc & xls format, is there any other office suite then OpenOffice.org than can do that? OpenOffice.org is good it's just a bit slow on limited RAM and CPU like this. I googled around and KWord can open doc format, preserve some of the formats but can't write on the document. Don't know yet if AbiWord can do it.

Other things that I would like to know is :
- which desktop manager comes with any of windows look a like themes?
- which emulator supports IE, MSN & Yahoo messenger (I'm aware of aMSN and Linux version of Yahoo Messenger however the feel is a bit diffrent with aMSN and Yahoo version looks ancient).

Sorry if I ask to many questions, I'm still googling around for the answers, I was just hoping someone who has gone through this could share their experience.

Many thanks in advance.

RaiReg

any distro should do, as long as you configure it correctly.
icewm has tons of available themes, including xp themes. it's pretty fast too - good for the clients you'll be configuring. for that matter, if you're already familiar with mandrake, i know 10.0 (and possibly earlier versions) has icewm included, along with several other wm's.
that's gonna be a bit more difficult. there's always wine, but why not just run mozilla firefox with a windows theme (i'm sure that even with the default theme, windows users will still be able to use it quite well). for msn and yahoo, i would just use gaim. it does look a little more harsh than it's counterparts for windows, but integrating both messengers (yahoo and msn) makes it a lot easier. you can try using wine for emulating those messengers, but gaim seems easier to setup.
abiword is the same as kword: you can read but cannot write msword docs. i would just go with openoffice and do a custom install where you eliminate everything you don't absolutely need - it'll run fast enough. the first time it loads on a fresh boot, it'll be slow, but after that it's faster, especially if you're using a wm that doesn't use up too much resources.

btw, here is a link to the xp theme for icewm. i know there's some that come with it, but i think this one is an addon: http://themes.freshmeat.net/projects/icewmsilverxp/
it doesn't look exactly like xp, but a little configuring and you'll have it.