Best Distro for an old machine

[Nicholas Leippe]

As far as tweaking the kernel for interactivity/games, you can try these:

- choose the cpu option that matches your cpu
- in the io scheduler, choose cbq for the default
- choose 1000 for your HZ value
- choose to preempt the big kernel lock
- choose the premptable/desktop option instead of the server option
- if you don't have multiple cpu cores, disable SMP

These are probably the biggest things that can affect how your kernel will 
make things feel.

To help video playback and codecs (which some games may use):

edit your /etc/sysctl.conf and add:

dev.rtc.max-user-freq = 1024

then:

echo 1024 > /proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq