Corvillus

PC World has a column on how to make Ubuntu 6.06 - Dapper Drake (a fine distribution by the way), run well on old hardware. He mentions several good ideas, including some configuration changes to speed up GNOME or KDE, and how to install Xfce as a desktop environment instead. Personally, I’d take it a step further though. If you don’t need the extra functionality a full desktop environment provides, the best thing to do is just ditch the desktop environment entirely and instead select a barebones window manager with a low memory footprint. I personally have experience with Fluxbox and find it very easy to use, and would recommend it for a machine with low specs (it can even run well on 64MB RAM). I have also heard good things about WindowMaker and PekWM. Anyway, the article goes on to mention that disabling uneccessary services and startup processes is important as well, and links to this thread in the Ubuntu forums.

PC World - Free Agent: Make Dapper Drake Perform on Old Hardware