The answer to this is probably somewhere but I have been looking at Linux distrobutions all night and I felt this would be the easiest and best place to get this answered.

I have been looking for some Linux distrubutions that I could use in my Computer Engineering class.

Well each student gets a computer to use and install up to 4 operating systems on. Currently I have windows 98, windows 2000, and soon to have XP on it.

Now this is a Pentium 3 proccessor with about 512 mb of ram. It has built in graphics so I am not sure on that part.

To the actual question. I am wondering if Linux Kubuntu 10.10 will run on this machine smoothy.

One more thing to add is the hard drive partition for the Linux Distro is either 10 or 20 GB.

Any help would be greatly appreciated or if you have any sugestions on what Linux Distrobution might work better for this that would be great too. I am most familiar with Ubuntu, Mint, and some of Kubuntu.

Thanks again.

I have a laptop with similar characteristics and was able to run KDE on it, although I didn't test it very heavily or run very much at the same time so I don't know how well it will work under such situations.

Considering your hw I'd suggest you run a lightweight distro like Puppy of if you wish to stay within the *buntu family Lubuntu or Xbuntu (these would be the *buntu core but with a lighter desktop environment)

As the cost of Linux is 0, if you have the time you can dl and install Kubuntu (or Ubuntu) and see if it works satisfactorily but make sure you turn off the desktop effects. Ram should be sufficient, but you might consider limiting the nuber of apps running.

Depending on what distro and apps you load the / partition could be around 5gb (I'm using 9 with devel packages installed and /temp and /var folders)