Hi there,
I was considering setting up an older PC I have for one of my siblings, for basic web browsing and document viewing/editing.

The thing is I need to know which Linux distribution would be the best to accomplish this, running on a old 386 Pentium 3.

Any ideas for a first time Linux user?

for a first time user
http://www.ubuntu.com/
is the way to go

Isn't Ubuntu fairly recent? Are you sure it would run on an "older" machine?

I'm talking about a Pentium 3, 733mhz, no graphics or sound card.

yeah the current version might be a little much. maybe you could look into the older builds i was thinking more for a first time user than an ancient PC.

http://www.gentoo.org/ is the only other one im familiar with but i wouldnt call it new user friendly

No such thing. The 386 and P3 are several generations apart (separated by nearly 15 years)

Either ways, I'd sooner stick an older copy of Windows on it...

I have installed Ubuntu on to a P3 733MHz PC with a Asus 6600 Graphics Card with 32 MB DDR memory and a Sound Blaster audio card and it handled it fine. You are missing the graphics card at least with puts some strain on the CPU using shared memory. Bot Ubuntu does come with a live boot mode so you can test it before deciding if it is worth installing on to a physical partition on the HDD.

Lubuntu will be released as one of the *Ubuntu distro variants for the first time expected at the end of October. It uses the LXDE desktop. It consumes less memory, IIRC about 50 MBs plus less. A lighter file manager and a some other lighter apps make it small on memory footprint. I have not tried the LXDE desktop yet but if your lacking in powerful hardware then It maybe worth a test run. Some betas are available if you can not wait for it to be released as a final release.

**** Small Linux runs great on older hardware.

I'm sure Ubuntu would work and it is very user friendly, but I think you'd find it a bit sluggish on older hardware. Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFE desktop) may be ok or it may still be a little too heavy.

I've heard lots of good things about DSL (as suggested above) but I haven't used it myself.

I've found PuppyLinux a nice little distro with a warm helpful community. It runs nicely on minimal hardware. Puppy by default runs in live mode (off CD or USB, or combo) although you can install if you want.

I also heard of an alternate lightweight distro called WattOS (its based on Ubuntu) although don't know what its like.

PS I would suggest set Abiword as default for doc editing (lighter weight than OpenOffice - installed with many distro by default, otherwise should be in repository) and perhaps Opera may be the best bet for web-browsing (I've heard its the friendliest to older hardware - if you use Firefox, make sure not to have too many extensions/add-ons loaded).

Another vote for Puppy. Similar to DSL, use whichever you like better.

Thanks for all the info.

I think I'll try out both the Xubuntu, and Puppy.

I am a linux beginer,too.

My p3 933 384mb 40gb rage fury pro system runs Debian 5.03 lenny

Debian has more older programs and gnome desktop on it than ubuntu

for example, Debian ships on Gnome version 2.22.3, otherwise ubuntu has 2.8 in their New works

and if you are more good at linux, you can choose more lite other window manager , like xfce. not gnome or kde