i'm doing something similiar, that is, planning on installing linux or *bsd on a ~200MHz machine. i've tried a bunch of distros (not on the slow box, just in general) and i'm hooked on gentoo. package management via emerge has been very nice. however, you don't want to spend a month compiling all the packages. however, one can start at stage3, not having to compile core packages that take about a day even on a fast box. gentoo's emerge does have binary packages available for some things, but i dunno about all. i'm considering trying debian again, i tried it a few years ago and after considerable install difficulties i was so dissappointed at the lagtime of the stable install that i nuked it. however a friend of mine ran debian for a while and said one can get almost the latest and greatest packages by choosing the "non-stable" option for everything. the other OSes i'd consider would be FreeBSD or possibly OpenBSD. i'm setting the machine up as a firewall, i assume you want a desktop, so you likely have different priorities.