I say it's your RAM slowing you down. You should be able to handle DSL ro PUppy well on that amount of RAM, but a regular Ubuntu install won't, which is what goes in even with the Alternate CD, unless you do a command-line install. The Alternate CD will do a full install with out needing the 192MB of RAM to boot the LiveCD to do the same thing. If you do a command-line install, and then add a custom set of packages, you can trim it down a lot.
Of course for tips see: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/LowMemorySystems
I'll third DSL and Puppy Linux. Also, I've run the BSDs before and they can be made quite small. It's been a while, but I used to run a Mac IIsi with NetBSD in 5MB RAM and an 80MB HDD. Of course it was basically only a dial-up PPP gateway, but it worked.
Jon.
On 4/4/07, Jonathan Hutchins hutchins@tarcanfel.org wrote:
I have an old laptop, IBM Thinkpad 380 Z, that had Mandrake 9.1 installed and running reasonably. It's a low-power system, with only a 300MHz PII, 96M of ram, and a 3G hard drive, but it ran Mandrake reasonably well.