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DSL and Tinycore have different goals though... I don't think tiny core is pushing the I can run on a 486 bit as much.

That said slitaz is pretty nice.

"The reviews all cover current releases (except for Lubuntu, which is now at version 12.04)."

The last Damn Small Linux release was in late 2008.

Uhhh...and wouldn't it be kinda , you know, unsafe to run a distro that hasn't had a single update in 4 years? Frankly I don't think I'd trust ANY OS that hadn't had so much as a single update in 4 years, who knows how many bugs that have been patched are still present in DSL. Sure if all you are doing is futzing with an old machine and not allowing it to hook to the Internet then fine, but if that's the case then that Win95 or whatever is on it would do just as well.

It just seems a little crazy to me to even entertain something that has been for all intents and purposes abandoned as a viable OS for use on the net. I mean you can still download those last releases of Xandros Community Edition, like DSL their website is still up, but I wouldn't recommend it.

VectorLinux has two distinct advantages over pure Slackware: Speed and native dependency checking.

Unfortunately, you give up Slackware's extremely stable nature, and ability to customize the installation down to the individual packages. As for dependency checking, you can always use slapt-get. Personally I prefer building and maintaining my own packages via pkgbuilds or just compiling from source. I have to take the extra time to seek out dependencies, but I learned more about how GNU/Linux works using Slackware than with all the other distros combined. Edit: And of course I forgot that Slackware can still be installed on as low as a 486 with 64MB RAM! You can't beat that for old/low specs.

Still, I do prefer Arch these days for the bleeding-edge packages and excellent support community. I can still build and install from source if necessary, and my system is built piece by piece so there's no cruft. I realize Arch is far from newbie-friendly, but I would definitely say it can be considered a "lightweight" distro given how bare it can be if you want.

Edited 2012-06-18 07:10 UTC

The problem I've found with any of those "old systems", not talking about some 486 that someone found in an attic but what you'd normally find, those P3s and P4s that seem to be everywhere? yeah their power usage was just awful compared to even a cheapo Atom or AMD E series or ARM, those things just blew through the power, especially anything to do with netburst.

So while I can appreciate playing with the old stuff just to goof around I have to wonder if keeping anything like that for an actual purpose would be smart or if you'd waste more in electricity than you'd save just getting a small ARM box or one of those $100 E350 kits where they draw like 8w on average. I can tell you when I finally got around to replacing my boys Pentium Ds for an AMD Hex and Quad the power bill dropped pretty dang quick. I hadn't thought about how much power and cooling them old units took, just as tossing their CRTs for LCDs a few months later caused another decent sized drop. You don't realize how little they cared about power draw back then until you actually change them out for something modern but its a pretty big difference.

That is why the only older machine I've kept is a 754 Sempron, it only pulls 35w or so and makes a nice nettop, I'm sure it'll be even better when i get around to tossing the Sempron for a Mobile Athlon with better thermal controls.

When all the overall resources and energy consumption are taken into account, the total cost of manufacturing and shipping new electronic thingy tends to eclipse the energy usage from continuous operation of old machine - at least within the limits of sensible usage patterns (not turned on 24/7 and such; well, and perhaps not if that's some Pentium D or smth). It might be often not directly apparent because all externalities are virtually never accounted for in retail prices.

P3s were moderately decent BTW, comparable to that Sempron you keep, certainly in the most popular Celeron (not pushing things) or even Celeron Tualatin variants (0.13 - nice those ones, and quite fast; unfortunately, Intel marketing was too often succesful in convincing that in fact slower Netburst Celerons were "better" with their much higher clock and so on...).
Many budget AMDs similar - and I even keep around an Athlon XP Palomino which, according to my back-of-the-napkin calculations, uses at most as many Watts as your Sempron (it's underclocked and undervolted - slight performance loss doesn't matter in how it's sometimes used; it's more a "cool, I have a decade old PC which is still perfectly comfortable in 'daily' tasks" thing)

Edited 2012-06-19 16:07 UTC

Your 64 MiB were on the low side even in the times of that Pentium III of yours... hell, my Pentium II 266 has six times as much RAM.

Stop doing this to yourself, go though some scrapyard or something and get for nothing a much better PC (or at least surplus RAM)

My thoughts initially, but I suppose someone looking for a slimmed-down distro (rather than configuring one themselves; Linux, BSD or otherwise) probably wouldn't have the patience to read the documentation for maintaining a BSD install, even though ports and pkg_foo are much simpler in essence.

Edited 2012-06-18 14:29 UTC

TBH if you are going to go to this amount of effort you already know what you are doing (or one should hope so).

Probably because BSD is not Linux.
Not really a good reason but I'm guessing it's a pretty likely one.