Thread: What distro to use to resurrect an old Thunderbird rig?

I have an Athlon T-bird rig I'm trying to resurrect from being terribly slow to usable again. It's been running Windows XP for years with 448MB of RAM but one of the RAM slots has kicked the bucket so I'm down to 384MB now. I have run XP on it with 256MB but I'm sure you can imagine what fun that would be especially after using the same installation for 3 years straight. But I digress.
I am wondering if the newer versions of the common distributions would be too hefty for 384MB RAM and an 850MHz T-bird (it's degrading so I've toned down the overclock). I wouldn't be running KDE because it will probably suck up too much of the precious little RAM I have.

Full specs:
850MHz Athlon T-bird.
384MB PC133
9800 Pro 128MB (overkill to the max but I had a spare card lying around and it was better than the old GF2 MX400 that the PC already had)
SoundBlaster Live! 16-bit. I think it's the platinum version.
ASUS A7V (VIA KT133 chipset)
160GB 7200RPM Samsung PATA drive.

Try Xubuntu and Fedora with XFCE and see how well it runs

If Xubuntu and Fedora XFCE are too slow try slax.

Will do; never used Slax though.

Ubuntu 9.04 and Fedora 11 with Gnome run ok on a trashy Celeron 900 with 512MB RAM booting from SD. This is not ideal but it runs, so your 850MHz Athlon T-bird should run ok on XFCE which is faster and less demanding than Gnome or KDE.

A netbook spin of Fedora or Ubuntu should run ok too.

Debian is usually good for older machines but it can be a pain to setup.

Just to throw a spanner into the works, how about considering FreeBSD running the XFCE4 desktop. That should run pretty sweetly on that setup.

Xubuntu served me well on an older laptop, but then again it was a P4 @ 2GHz, so I don't know how well Xubuntu will scale down from there. Also, you could just ditch the Desktop environments altogether and go with a lightweight window manager like one of the *Box (e.g. Open Box, Black Box, Flux Box) or FVWM. If you want to tear out even more bloat, you should go with debian, or if you are really adventurous (or you have a computer cluster at your disposal for compiling), you could go with Gentoo. I'd not recommend Gentoo on a machine that slow, though because compiling will take _FOREVER_. Arch Linux might be a good way to get the speed and flexibility of Gentoo without all the compiling.