UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have an old pc, about 133-200 mhz with very little memory and hard-drive. I want to install a small and fast *nix system with ion or some other simple wm for maximal performance. It's supposed to be used as a desktop. If someone could share their experience with older machines and some recommendations it'd be appreciated.

Regards
Richard

Damn Small Linux immediately comes to mind.

With sufficient creativity, you can even run gentoo on old PC's... I've got it running on a Pentium 233 with a 1.2GB hard drive. I had to do crazy things like turn /usr/share/doc into a compressed filesystem, then mount it with unionfs... This is not reccomended if you lack insanity and obsessive compulsion.

The number one bottleneck with old PC's is going to be memory. There's no getting around a multitasking OS needing more memory than a single-tasking thing like DOS. Give it at least 64 megs. Old mem is cheap and plentiful if you can find it.

Yeah I also had dsl in mind but was thinking if an older system (sunOS, BSD?) wouldn't be better for the box, since it's supposed to be used as a desktop. I'm looking in it right now and it seems it has 48 or 64 MB memory, a 233 mhz processor with a too old mothercard (only supporting 133) and an 8 GB hard-drive (so space will not be an issue). But abou DSL? Isn't that completely dektop oriented? Can I even switch X system on it?