Linux distro on PII laptop

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Happened to come across an old IBM Laptop and was wondering whats a good linux distro on this relic. The specs are listed below.

300MHz PII
96MB RAM (Maximum it can go)
5.1GB Hard Drive
Crystal Sound Port
NeoMagic 128 Video

It had Windows XP Pro on it but I removed it because I knew 1st hand it was slow. On top of that Xubuntu 9.10 freezes when it gets to mouse cursor. Would you suggest Debby on a system like this or something like Arch or VectorLinux. I need something that is easy to set up and responsive on a laptop like this. I would like this thing to be a Basic Web-Browsing/ Office/ IM Machine.

I have Puppy running on a similar machine. It's blisteringly fast, compared to my recent experience of trying to use Vista (with BSODs) on a 1.8GHz / 1Gibyte machine (which, as of last night, now sports Ubuntu 9.10 beta - using just 256Mibyte - and got me engrossed for hours in OpenArena).

It's unfortunate that OpenOffice isn't really happy with a mere 96Mibyte of RAM, but if you can live without that, you should be fine.

openArena Nice .....

I'd look for a lightweight distro with perhaps Xfce desktop instead of Gnome or KDE. FWIW, I remember those NeoMagic 128's and was glad that laptop manufacturers stopped using them --S3's were a LOT better than the NeoMagics.

Puppy or Damn Small are your best bet.

Puppy or DSL would probably work fine. VectorLinux is very fast, and I imagine Arch would belike lightning if you had the patience to set it up.

Debian I think would be too heavy. I had a 400MHz G3 (ppc) with 420MB of RAM that was still ever so slightly on the sluggish side with Debian (I ran it with OpenBox and lxpanel for my gui). With a weaker processor and less RAM, it would probably start to drag on you a bit.

Web-browsing/office/IM- Pidgin or Empathy should work fine for IM. I'd suggest trying out Midori for web browsing and AbiWord for your word processing. If you need a spreadsheet app, there's Gnumeric. OOo likes more RAM than that system has, so I'd shy away from it. Also, if you use an e-mail client, Claws is a lot lighter than ThunderBird.

You can also look at stuff even more minimal like netbsd if it suits your needs.

Try Slitaz. When I used it it was completely from ram and it only used about 90-100 meg when on the internet. Also I should mention that the computer I used it on was a 500Mhz PIII

I would suggest Debian and then that you use Blackbox with it.