Distro Advice: Few resources & pretty?

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Guys,

Im after a little advice. Im putting together a couple of desktop machines for a youth organisation, from stuff we have lying about. We have a couple of Compaq desktops with Celeron 333Mhz CPU's, between 96 and 128Mb RAM, and HDD's of a between 5 and 8 Gb.

Im trying to squeeze the best possible performance from these machines from a Linux distro, but it still needs to look pretty, and be intuitive enough for technophobes to use. Saying that, they'll only be using OpenOffice, Firefox etc, nothing to multimedia heavy (we have a number of pretty well specc'd laptops that they'll use mostly).

Ive been trying distro's left right and centre. I started with a baseline of the current Ubuntu, both from Live and installed, and the machines cant cope with the sexyness of the GUI. So i went to the other end of the spectrum and tried DSL. Now it runs like hot poo off a shovel, and I love FluxBox, but its too 'geek' for the target users. So Ive tried a few distro's in between:

- Ubuntu
- DSL
- DSL-N
- PCLinuxOS
- LinuxMint

...and then thought hey - what about Knoppix. Well I was sceptical that it'd run ok with KDE as the GUI, but hey presto it does. Admittedly from live its a bit sluggish, but when its installed it works whizzy quick! The thing is, its designed to run from a LiveCD, few resources, and you can tell this when its installed to HDD, because as they say, not everything works.

I know I could hack and compile a distro from something already out there, but I'm still a bit of a Linux n00b truth be told, spoilt by pretty Ubuntu.

So - I need some advice. I need something that makes use of few resources like Knoppix, uses KDE, but is designed to run installed on a HDD. Im sure there must be a (popular - I hope!) branch somewhere Ive overlooked?

Thanks in advance!
 
Possibly Arch, I've been hearing a lot about it (from these very forums) over the last few days, but have been waiting till i get my new (but old) laptop to try it out :)
 
Ubuntu is too heavy for those PCs

Arch and E17/ Gnome/ Fluxbox is a good option, as it is compiled for the 686 archetecture, so should be pretty nippy on those boxes.
 
http://www.xubuntu.org/

Derivative of Ubuntu but uses a different GUI [Xfce or somesuch]. It has been designed for old/low-spec machines.

xubuntu website said:
To run the Desktop CD (LiveCD + Install CD), you need 128 MB RAM to run or 192 MB RAM to install. The Alternate Install CD only required you to have 64 MB RAM.

To install Xubuntu, you need 1.5 GB of free space on your hard disk.

Once installed, Xubuntu can run with 64 MB RAM, but it is strongly recommended to use at least 128 MB RAM.

Worth a try :)
 
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