Best Distro for a Pentium III + Dual-Booting with XP?

[Markeh]

I've got an old ancient desktop (given to me by a friend). It's running a Pentium III (450Mhz) on an MSI MS-6131 mobo, 128Mb RAM, an ATI RAGE 128 GL graphics card, an 8Gb Toshiba hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, a BT Voyager 1040 Wi-Fi card, a Creative ES1371 sound card, and is currently running XP.

I'd like to run a distro of Linux (any distro will do, so long as it will run fairly well on my system), and would like to dual boot with the XP I already have. I'm a complete novice to Linux, dual-booting, or anything to do with what I want to do, to be fair.

Any good distros to use? How do I do the dual boot?

[HotelUser]

Download an application called wubi. Open it in Windows XP. It will automatically install Ubuntu -without even touching your partitions- from inside XP, ready to dual boot. When you don't want it anymore you can even uninstall it like any application from XP

[Markeh]

Thanks for the help, but the hard disk decided to fail yesterday :S taking the sound card and Wi-Fi card and then getting rid of the thing

[HotelUser]

Thanks for the help, but the hard disk decided to fail yesterday :S taking the sound card and Wi-Fi card and then getting rid of the thing

That gives you an excuse to get an even larger hard drive!

[Markeh]

To be fair, it's a Pentium III, I have a slightly better desktop (AMD Sempron 2400+ ftw), but I got important stuff on it, and I daren't risk putting Linux on it

[HotelUser]

To be fair, it's a Pentium III, I have a slightly better desktop (AMD Sempron 2400+ ftw), but I got important stuff on it, and I daren't risk putting Linux on it

There's no risks of losing your data with wubi, because no partitioning is happening.

[Markeh]

So, is Wubi like running something in VirtualBox then?

And will it run on my (slightly better) desktop? (AMD Sempron 2400+, 256Mb RAM, MSI KM3M-V mobo, 40Gb HDD, XP)

[HotelUser]

So, is Wubi like running something in VirtualBox then?

And will it run on my (slightly better) desktop? (AMD Sempron 2400+, 256Mb RAM, MSI KM3M-V mobo, 40Gb HDD, XP)

It's not running ontop of Windows. It creates a virtual hard drive stored on your C drive, then it's mounted upon boot and Ubuntu recognizes it as physical harddrive. Quite cool, actually. The "virtual" hard drive is stored as a file in the c:\Ubuntu folder. Other than that folder your Windows is left untouched!

And yes it should run on that machine just fine.