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Original post by dih it runs windows 2000

I guess that means every Linux distro would be fine. Just install something you like and disable eye candy until it runs smooth.

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Original post by Sander ...Ubuntu 9.10 is flying on my 900 Mhz 1 GB RAM EeePC.

Same here, but an eeepc is still a modern piece of hardware (albeit a very low power one when compared to what's available on the shelf today). Gotta remember that some people will want to work with their good'ol Pentium 3, flaky power supply and cardboard RAM included ;)

The problem really isn't the distro itself, but the window manager and applications you are trying to run. Gnome isn't too bad, but XFCE and Enlightenment could be better candidates when running with low resources.

Ah, almost forgot. This post was typed on an eeepc 701 running linux ;)

True. And 512 MB of modern DDR2 RAM will work better than 512 MB of old SDRAM. Also important is hard drive speed. In a low RAM machine you will want to use swap space. Swapping is a lot faster on some fancy SSD drive than a regular 7200rpm HDD.

How's it going dih?

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Original post by dih 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)

Well using Linux is a good time to learn to love the command line!

But you won't have a problem running some sort of desktop. I've had great success on somewhat low spec machines with a minimal Ubuntu install following this simple guide:

http://wiki.dennyhalim.com/ubuntu-minimal-desktop

I've been going the LXDE route and it is quite nice.

On these machines I stick with strictly GTK apps only (that means avoiding the GNOME libs too!). I prefer vim-gtk for development, though if you must have an IDE, Geany is a super lightweight (read: minimal-featured) IDE using GTK that might make you more comfortable. For something more full-featured you might check out CodeLite, which uses wxWidgets. Code::Blocks does too, and is pretty popular, but they haven't had a stable release in almost two years. Just try to stay away from mixing in full GNOME applications like Anjuta, Evince, GNOME Games, etc. if you can, and definitely don't install QT (Kdevelop), Mono (MonoDevelop), or Java (NetBeans, Eclipse) applications. This will reduce your memory usage significantly. So use xpdf instead of evince, mplayer instead of vlc, audacious instead of vlc/banshee/rhythmbox, etc. Basically, when you install something, make sure it doesn't pull in any dependencies you don't want to use.

Since I theorize you are somewhat of a linux n00b, switching to something thats NOT Dev-C++ or MSVC will be hard on its own....don't listen to the people being like "Yeah d00d just get a terminal and emacs and you'll be good." In theory, they are correct, and thats how I do my development because frankly, its just a lot nicer. HOWEVER, switching to unix development AND a new operating system AND a new compiler environment is hard enough, without diving in head-first into a totally new user-interface paradigm at the same time.

I recommend XUbuntu, because it comes pre-loaded with XFCE, which is very lightweight compared to Gnome, and it has all the simplicity and software of vanilla Ubuntu. For a dev environment, I feel like Code::Blocks is the closest to MSVC, but if you play around with just "text editor and makefiles" you'll fall in love eventually. I also highly, highly recommend CMake, because it allows you to make IDE-independant projects that even compile under MSVC.

I would suggest Ubuntu. Its has a stable and well maintained repository.
If you want a light version you can check out Xubuntu. Requirements