Which lightweight linux distribution can you recommend me to install in an old compaq presario to use just for web browsing and other simple tasks?

I’ve heard of several, but haven’t tried any. Check out lifehacker.com. They often do articles on linux distros including what you’re talking about.

Also, this one and this might help

Puppy and Damn Small are great for an old system. You’ll have short boot times and very little system resource usage.

Either one should be fine, it’s just up to you to chose which you prefer.

Thanks for the answers! I’m trying xubuntu 9.04 to see how it goes!

Yeah, I was going to recommend Xubuntu. Puppy Linux is another option, although the learning curve might be a bit steep if you’re used to Ubuntu. I wouldn’t try Damn Small Linux, it’s more of a tech-demo than an actual distro.

<3 Xubuntu

I think Ubuntu would run too, but Xubuntu would run better and is a great distro anyway. (Note that I’m biased, as I’m involved in the development community of Xubuntu.)

You might also want to investigate ext4 as filesystem – startup will be blazing fast and performance is also supposed to be better.

I have a 6 year old laptop (craptop) with a 2.0GHz celeron and 512 RAM that gets killed by ubuntu and even xubuntu for some reason. The most success I’ve had was running puppy linux, because it just loads into RAM. Its also the only distro that actually worked correctly with my wireless card. I would definitely try it out because you can’t do any damage since it doesn’t install anything.