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A good distro for a legacy machine?

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Devillion:
Alright, so after 8 (hell yea) years of Win98 on my 1996 IBM Aptiva E2U (speed? power? wuzzat?), im going to move to linux.

This is not my first linux experience, so dont toss n00b distros out. However, all of my other linux experiences have been laptop based, and based on their wardriving ability. (i dont use desktops really, hence why i have not upgraded ;P)

This aptiva has like 300 mhz, AMD k6/3DNOW/MMX. It has 256mb ram. Video card is a nonexistant onboard ATI rage card.

What would be a good distro that is very lightweight for my system? It only need basic webbrowsing/video/music/cd burning capabilites, nothing over-the-top. Should i consider something like FreeBSD?

Also, does the MMX/3DNOW processor matter at all? Will that affect what kernels i can use?

I have had experience with Debian/Libranet/Knoppix/Warlinux.

WMD:
With that RAM, you could run almost anything on that.

However, I'll to my recommendation of Slackware.  Also, since you've used Debian, you can use that too.

As for kernels, Slack (and probably Debian) ship with kernels compiled for 386/486.  Both are friendly to new kernels, so you could compile one with K6 optimizations (which I assume would be 3DNow).

Orethrius:
I would be remiss not to mention VectorLinux, which is based on the Slackware kernel - you could probably squeeze a teensy bit more performance out of your machine with that.

 :cool:

WMD:
Vector is compiled for i686.  I don't remember the K6 being an i686 chip.

Orethrius:
WMD, I love ya, but you're nuts.
Base Requirements (given he might have to compile it himself on less than a 686 architecture).

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