Ok, I was wondering what's a Low Ram linux distro that is good for development of Perl/C++/Lua? I'm probably getting an old desktop for development, so i was wanting a distro that can be used for that. If it's a live cd that's ok but it'd be nice if it coculd be installed to the hard disk

How low is the memory?

DSL (Damn Small Linux) was always known for being small but featured. It's based off of Debian.
If you don't have much memory, you can install nearly any distro just don't use a desktop like KDE or Gnome.
{Flux,Open}box are pretty good if you still want things like a taskbar and window buttons, etc. You can also install iDesk for desktop icons since they're just window managers and don't provide them for you.
Tiling window managers are even more memory-efficient but take some time getting used to, but they can speed up productivity since you generally use the keyboard more than the mouse.

As for a programming environment, try to stick with a terminal editor and compiling by hand/scripts versus an IDE like Code::Blocks, Sun Studio, etc.

Hope that helps.

For low RAM you will need a terminal and a terminal editor. The most common choices seems to emacs and vim (or possibly vi). Emacs is almost an IDE, you can do everything from within emacs. Vi(m) on the other hand is very light weight, but has a very steep learning curve.

Do keep in mind that 15 years ago I was developing professional software on Linux using 486-based computers with many kilobytes of memory and tens of megabytes hard drive space. My pettiest system was a 386SX with 4 MB RAM and a 40 MB hard drive running Slackware without X11. It worked, although it took all night to rebuild the kernel.

I currently develop on 600 MHz ARM-based boards with 512 MB RAM and no hard drive, running a Debian-based distribution.

So when you say old desktop and low RAM, could you be more specific? Most people's "old desktop" and "low RAM" usually sound awfully luxurious to me.

I'm running KDE 3.5 on a 256MB machine and it's totally OK developing C++/Perl programs on it with KDevelop and GVim. This is with a FreeBSD OS.
I guess it's no worse on any normal Linux distribution like (K)Ubuntu or Arch.

I still wonder what exactly the definition of "low ram" is :D

E.g., I've run Debian/GNOME for years on a box with 1 GiB of RAM + Athlon XP 1800+ (single core). If it would have been to bad for me, I would not have used it. So if "low ram" is 1 GiB, you could run most Mainstream Desktops with a little bit of fine tuning, if any.

Seems that just about any distro can be configured to run in low ram.
I put Ubuntu on my PS3, and it ran like crap till i disabled most the friendly stuff that it boots up with.
And after that, i just remote shell to the thing to transfer programs from my dev environment on my actual PC.
If the remote-shell is an option. Run with it. It saves you a lot of hastle.

Ditto for "what is low?". I have run Ubuntu with 512 MB RAM and Debian with 256 MB and they worked fine. Ubuntu 9.10 is flying on my 900 Mhz 1 GB RAM EeePC.

i'm not completley sure on the ram specs it runs windows 2000 but i also got a 64 mb ram computer also.

and i'd like a desktop (i'm not that good with terminals)