Linux flavour on an intel PII 128MB RAM??

[clandestine]

Just wondering...

What linux flavour would be the best one if I want to maximize performance on an intel PII 200MHz cpu with only 128MB RAM?
As for now, I run RedHat 9. This works fine (though I read that recommended CPU capacity was 400MHz and minimum RAM was exactly 128MB *smiles*), but it is a bit slow.

I have been thinking about gentoo, fedora and debian. I want something highly customizable, with minimum of packages installed, and a nice, sleek GUI. KDE and GNOME are too demanding for my system. Blackbox is OK. I have not tried any other *box.

Just for clarity; I use it as an everyday computer, not a web server, I used to have a much better one... well, this is a long story... *smiles*
Anyway, this means that I need to run programmes for burning CD:s and delivering sound. If anyone could give me a suggestion about how to be able to watch a movie, despite the limits posed by my computer, I would be extremely happy!

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[kriss]

What about Slackware with some memory-efficient WM like iceWM or enlightenment? That is what I would use. But really, you should download many different WM's off freshmeat.net and pick your own favorite, that way you'll be most comfortable!

Good luck

[lordnothing]

gentoo would be the fastest and slimmest distro as long as you installed from stage1 and were *very* picky about your CFLAGS and USE flags...

as far as WMs go, i would recommend kahakai or flux..

[Blue|Fusion]

I tried mandrake and redhat 9 on the same setup trashpaq. All works OK...just mighty slow (but what can ya do?). I run it as server, and as long as you shutdown GUI and run it in runlevel 3, its quite sufficient, but if you plan on using it with KDE or GNOME, it will be alot slower.

[zdawg]

Gentoo.
I have Gentoo on two boxen, one of which is a P2-266, 64M ram, 3.2G hdd.
It runs extremely well, fast for such an old box. Fluxbox is the wm.
I just installed the 2.6.3-gentoo-r1 kernel on it, replacing the 2.4.5 kernel it was running (which ran well too). Gentoo is very minimal to begin with.

[Mystic_Slayer]

I'm running Debian on a p1 166 mhz with 64 of ram and it works perfect.

Kernel 2.6.5

[Giro]

Yeh i wouldnt bother with Gentoo on such a slow machine Debian would be just as fast and you would save alot of time (I dought you could get a big list of CFLAGS anyway and isnt that the point of Gentoo using the compillers optimization options). Also i would like to see Gnome run on it older version used to run fast for me on a 500Mhz K6 but it had 256Mb RAM. I think Debians older package list would also have this advantge over Gentoo near bleeding edge.