Best sleek, trimmed down server distribution

[David Smith]

<quote who="Kenneth Burgener">
> Which distribution would you say would be the best for a LAMP server.
> The machine is an OLD AMD K6-2 500MHz, 128MB RAM system.  I want a
> lightning fast simple, trimmed down, non gui loaded Linux distribution.
>   Any suggestions?  I have heard that Gentoo, Debian, or Slackware are
> the most sleek distributions, is this so?
>
> Requirements:
> SSH login
> Will run Apache, PHP, MySQl
> Will run Samba
> Text based system config tool, similar to Suse's Yast (drives me crazy
> that Mandrake and RedHat don't seem to have something like this).

I have always loved Debian for this kind of setup. I usually use the
testing distribution, to avoid the massive updates in unstable and the old
package versions in stable. The install footprint is small for a minimal
install, around 200Mb, and even a 90Mhz processor with 48Mb RAM was enough
for my little Debian testing box. Go with stable if you don't mind having
older versions of php/mysql, because the security updates are available
more quickly.

Good luck!

--Dave