Operating system ( linux) for old laptops?

I have some old laptops i would like to get some sort of use of provided its worth even using them.

One of them has a intel celeron 700 mhz processor and 256 mb of ram
Another has Intel pentium 3 1,133 mhz processor and 512 mb of ram


What linux distros would some of you recommend?

The one with slower processor and memory i assume even with a linux distro that can run stable on it won't get very good flash videos.

 

Those specs are very limiting, as your processors are quite slow, and your RAM is minimal. What was on them to begin with? WinXP, or something even earlier?

I posted a thread somewhere on this forum about a lightweight replacement that I custom remixed from Lubuntu, called XPubuntu. Although to be honest, even that might be too much for your old anemic lappys?

If XPubuntu isn't for your machines, the lightest weight distro that I have ever used (with a graphical GUI environment and full set of user programs) was AntiX. You may want to also check out Puppy Linux, although I have no experience with that one.

Stay away from the more well known Gnome, KDE, & Unity desktop environments. Usually I would tell folks to look for XFCE, LXDE & Enlightenment desktop distros. In your case, even those MAY be too much. You should probably be looking at Openbox, Blackbox, Fluxbox, IceWM, JWM or WindowMaker desktop environments. Less eye candy equals lower resource draw. It might be a challenge to find the right mix of "least amount of desktop environment resource draw" versus "graphical aesthetics to feel comfortable enough to get things done."

Depending on your level of computer expertise and comfort level, you may also want to consider installing a "server distro" (no graphical environment), then installing a lightweight window manager of your choice. For instance, Debian server is considered a very solid, stable, and popular server distro...so you would receive all the benefits of a large community for troubleshooting. With the server distro successfully installed, you could then install the window manager of your choice, such as Openbox, Fluxbox, IceWM, etc..., simply by typing at the command line:

If IceWM isn't to your liking, you can uninstall at the command line with:

And you're back to a basic no-frills server distro. This will allow you to try various environments until you find the one you prefer, with the right mix of user features & performance.

Then again, if this all sounds like a huge hassle, or sounds like it's "way above your pay grade gibberish", the steps I described above for IceWM on a Debian server are just a "do it yourself" version of AntiX, which comes in IceWM or Fluxbox versions, if I recall correctly. More on AntiX here:

http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Note...stay with version 13 series, the newer version 14 series is a hybrid distro in partnership with Mepis, called MX-14 (Mepis/AntiX version 14), which uses an XFCE desktop and is likely too much for your system.

And here's more on Puppy...I don't have much to offer on it, other than I hear a LOT of people sing its praises for lower-specced hardware:

http://www.puppylinux.com/

This is either going to be very fun for you, or very challenging for you, depending on your outlook! Either way, I'll wish you good luck! And please let us know what you were successful with, in case someone else comes here wondering about a good distro for a similarly low-specced machine. Good luck!