Quoting Chris Wagner <ismgr@atchisonkansas.net>: 
 
> I need suggestions on the best distribution to run on older hardware 
> (talking P1 or K6-2 at best). 
  
> I have a bunch of parts in my garage that I want to use to piece together a 
> box to serve at home with, but I need to be able to run a fairly new 
> version, if at all possible. 
 
Part of this depends on your hard drive space.  I ran RH6.2 for a long time 
because it fit on a <2G disk.  I finally upgraded to a very lean 7.2, and 
ended up having to add a second disk because the log files kept filling up 
what little space remained. 
 
That said, there have been excellent improvements in the post 8 releases of 
Mandrake and RedHat for their speed and efficiency running GUI on older 
systems.  I'm running Mandrake 9.1 on a K6/2 550 right now (might be 
underclocked at 500, I'm not sure), with 256M RAM, and performance is 
satisfactory.  Launching programs under KDE is a little slow (even off of a 
7200RPM disk), but they respond reasonably well once they're up. 
 
Audio playback has "artifacts" if I do other things while it's running, but I 
have done NOTHING to optimize it yet, just barely enabled it.  Video playback 
is very good, but can bog down if I'm doing other tasks at the same time.   
 
I would say that 9.1 is competitive with W95 for performance.  Programs open 
much slower, but respond at least as well, and while MP3 playback isn't as 
reliable, I get can do full screen video if I single task, which I can't under 
Windows. 
 
If you have a reasonable life expectancy and don't need your machine for a 
week or so, you could install gentoo, and everythign would be compiled 
specificly for your system and run very efficiently. 

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