On Thu 17 Mar 2016 at 19:27:31 (-0700), David Christensen wrote:
If/ when you get the
Debian installer going, install to a HDD, don't use encryption, and
only install:
SSH server
Standard system utilities
You can add things carefully after that, but 512 MB of RAM, USB 1.1,
IDE HDD's, etc., will be limiting. That said, if you have some
spare network card(s) and the machine supports them, it would make a
decent firewall.
That's a very pessimistic view of a Pentium III clocking 800MHz.
My Pentium III runs jessie with 3.16.0-4-686-pae #1 SMP Debian
3.16.7-ckt20-1+deb8u4 (2016-02-29) i686 GNU/Linux kernel.
I run the fvwm window manager as on all my machines, and it has
512MB memory and 500GB PATA disk, running at 650MHz.