Alright so I have obtained enough loose components to create a working system and I've decided I'm going to put it on the network in my apartment and use it as a media storgae box. Basically it'll just hold some random data and lots of movies and whatnot that I will hopefully be playing out to the tv in my living room. The system specs are approx:
1.0ghz Duron
128mb ram
40gb hd
8gb hd
dvd rom
cd burner
9600pro 128mb video card

Now, what I'm looking for is a linux distro that has good hardware auto detection but is also really light weight. I'm interested in Smallish install size, fast on the slower hardware, but still functional. I have Suse9.3 on it now but that thing is pretty bloated, it's fine for my main computer but even using small desktop environments its kinda sluggish on my newly created monster. Anyways if you guys can suggest some Distro's (and the best low end hardware alternatives to KDE/Gnome) I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

Damn Small Linux !

You coul boot off a 50mb thumb-drive or install to the hard disk (200 megs) or boot the CD.

OR... you can copy the boot CD to ram just before boot up, an ompletely run off the *ram disk*

DamnSmallLinux has Excelent hardware detection..
But for your system, you dont really need hardware detection, you only really need to make sure one driver is loaded, your network card driver.

DamnSmallLinux also has a tiny X server, its fully X11 compatable, but very light weight.

Im 95% certain that DamnSmall Linux will have samba and NFS servers, but you may want to chech first.

Last time i user LFS, its used the IceWM window manager.. which is possable one of the fastest window managers around (except for twm.... but twm sucks )

but if you really want it to fly, dont bother with the graphcal user interface at all.

My vote is for DSL ( with slackware in second place )

I would actually recommend installing Debian. Assuming this computer has a network connection, I would use a network install disc, and just have it install the base system, then just apt-get your way to getting Xorg, and WindowMaker, and maybe even Login.app to match with it. You can really mold debian intowhatever you wish and nothing more by using net-install to get the base system, and then just apt-get whatever you need after that. It will save you plenty of space. I would use the 8G drive to boot from, and keep system files on, then use an ext2 partition on the entire 40G drive and mount it as /home, since I'm guessing that's where you'd keep your files. If not, maybe mount it as /media and put /home on the 8g. Actually, I would do that..I think I will...thanks for the idea!

Haha...no problem? lol.

Yea I intended on using the 40 for storage and the 8 for the OS install in case I want to change it up from time to time, although I might keep the 40 as a fat32 for when I network it with the windows computers here so they can use the files more easily...

thats way more than you need.
for a file server, a 600meg partiton will do fine.

For a box like that, Fedora Core 4 or Debian will work fine if you do not install packages you don't need. Your big problem will be RAM, not CPU. Consider not installing X-Windows at all. For a server, you just don't need it. Do your administration from another box, put your server under a desk or in a closet and forget about it. I have run a dozen web and FTP sites off a box no bigger.

If you *really* want to do administration from the box itself and really want a GUI, try either BlackBox or, as another poster suggests, WindowMaker. If you like Mac OS, you will like WindowMaker. It is reasonably fast and lean, pretty, and has what you need. Turn off some of the eye candy in your preferences (opaque move windows, "superfluous animations", etc.) if it feels slow, but this will be more due to video card than CPU. BlackBox is *very* spare, giving you some outlined window frames and a menu for launching applications, but it gets the job done. I have used a box with the same amount of RAM to do serious development before. With WindowMaker or BlackBox and emacs, you have enough RAM left over to have decent page cache and the box will actually perform quite well. My drive light came on when I logged in, loaded my editor and did my first compile and then stayed off for the rest of the day since everything was in RAM. Linux does very well now with keeping temporary files off the hard disk and not slowing your system down.

The bottom line is that with a (relatively) slower processor, you want the CPU to be able to be busy all the time. When it has to stop for disk access or swapping, it won't catch back up. A fast CPU can spend 9/10s of a second waiting for a drive access and still respond to the user in under a second. A slow processor needs the whole second for processing and needs to be able to get data from RAM to feel responsive. Linux will pre-emptively swap unused data to free up space and do a good job if you give it some room to work with.

If you find that you seem to be swapping (little free RAM, not much of a cache), run 'top' and have a look at your processes. See what is eating up your memory and get rid of it. You should be able to get your base system with X-Windows running down to about 20-22 MB of RAM, leaving you about the same to run a few applications and about 70-80 MB for cache. Most web browsers will drag your box down into the depths of harddrive thrashing. Various versions of Mozilla seem to take over 30 MB just to load. I use 'links' or 'lynx' on boxes with low amounts of RAM. They are command-line browsers with some color and even limited frames support.

As or serving files, I have saturated a 100MB ethernet with a dual P-90 file server (with SCSI RAID) running linux. You have more than enough power to serve files as fast as the network can take them and modern IDE drives will outperorm the ancient RAID system I was using.

BTW: Put your swap partition on your fastest drive (lowest seek time) or put a swap partition on each. It may make a difference.

as said above DAMN SMALL LINUX, or if u want, FreeBSD (yes, FreeBSD is not Linux), but liteweighted.

xboxrulz

Nice post, isn't it ?
You can see that you ask that question to three people, you receive three different answers.
OK, so I will also give my own opinion.
I would suggest, use the 8 gig disk as system disk, the disk space is not a lost space because you still can give the Unix filesystems to samba to be mounted by the client PC's.
I suggest the other disks to be used in Fat32 mode, so that they can be read, write and shared simultaneously by your Linux server and your Windows clients.
And, of course, I say "Use Mandrake" because it's really easy to install and use for beginners. Create all your Windows partitions booting off an ms-dos diskette or use the pre-existing Microsoft Windows install for creationg the FAT32 partions. Then boot off the first Mandrake CD, which will install and configure everything on a graphic base, including Ethernet and the Windows sharing files.
A standard install of such things will last about 30 minutes. If you don't like it, redo it, until it does what you want.
Hope this helps
Yordan

Yea It's going to be mostly for file sotrage/serving but I need a few other things to be done on it from time to time so I'm going to be leaving a graphical frontend on it. Just for those times, so nothing snazzy is required.

Yea I used Mandrake for awhile, wasn't a huge fan... don't really remember why. I don't need a beginners distro, while I'm not a Linux Guru by any means I can handle myself and dont get scared if I stumble into new territory so I'll probably be trying some of these distros shortly. It's looking like DSL and Debian will both make their way onto the box over the next few days.

One more vote for Dam Small Linux