I've noticed with linux of late that so many, include old faithful - Debian, are now moving in a direction that old old pc's simply cant be used anymore..
Now WattOS has always been good with old pc's but this too is getting hard due to LTS's being used.
I reckon an adventure could be worth a look at by Biff into old pc support as I use a linux system that can still be installed (and current) on Pentium 3's (1000Mhz copperhead)
It's not ubuntu based... its not red hat or centos or debian or any of the mainstream distros either... Its the very small (30mb iso!!!!! and a stupid 100mb hard drive installed) designed to be used with a pc with just 256mb ram. (16 MB of RAM and a little swap memory is possible if you really want to get nerdy)
BusyBox, a recent Linux kernel and GNU software. It boots with Syslinux and provides more than 200 Linux commands, the lighttpd web server, SQLite database, rescue tools, IRC client, SSH client and server powered by Dropbear, X window system, JWM (Joe's Window Manager), gFTP, Geany IDE, Mozilla Firefox, AlsaPlayer, GParted, a sound file editor and more is what it can come with.. i know it will happily run midori, and it can connect to wpa2-psk.. so modern wifi is catered for.
Downsides.... tazpkg for packages and tazpanel.. so limited there, no persistance either... but can be added if wanted only with ext2, 3 along with syslinux or extlinux boot loader.. last downside really.... its GNU/Linux
so not for the real newcomers to linux.
What do you guys think on this firstly re keeping old stuff alive...
Also Biff... whats your thoughts as it would be you building it