Feanor

First of all, the trick for fixing Xorg when it cannot auto detect the correct settings. You make an USB key or a CDROM with Puppy Linux Wary on it, boot Puppy, open the Xorg configuration tool and copy the "xorg.conf" resulting file, disable or remove the not needed parts (there are comments) and copy it in your X11 directory. You may wonder why Xorg doesn't have a configuration utility. The answer is the developers think it is capable of auto detection and when it fails, you must be punished for your sins so you must write the "xorg.conf" file by hand. By the way the "xorg.conf" is deprecated so one of these days I expect the developers to quit supporting even this last escape. If auto detection fails you throw away the PC.

Here the news, what to use with a old computer. Not "old" in the american sense, meaning one of two years old, more like 10-15 years old.
1. the said above Puppy Wary.
The problem with it is that the distro is thought as its author's personal toy. It works and it does many tricks but in the same time it is a pile of strange tools organized around strange menus. Maybe you can use it for some real work, I don't know.
2. Slitaz
It works with old hardware like the above but it looks less "swiss army knife" and much closer to main stream distros. In this case the limitation is software. There is almost everything for common tasks in the repository but not more than this and it is not much updated. I use it as backup on a secondary partition. Beware that "rolling" here means "it doesn't work", go for the "stable" version.
3. Bodhi
I have just installed it as main distro and it works. It is based on Ubuntu LTS and uses Enlightenment as desktop environment. The reason to use it on old computers is that is requires few hardware resources. The other pros are that it looks good and it allows to install updated software from Ubuntu/Debian repositories. You can also get all the "non-free codecs" to play videos and such. In fact it is the ONLY distro that plays Xvid files on my PC, using VLC. There is a flaw then, it doesn't come with applications by default, you must add them post-install using Synaptic, apt-get or from their Web appcenter. And it can be painfully long. On a side note: in theory the good thing of Enlightenment is that you can set almost every single detail of the desktop environment, all the bells and whistles and make your own theme or hack some existing theme. But it is the same as common GTK themes or icon collections, there are maybe 2 or 3 that look good enough to be really usable, the others either look amateurish or 20 years old or just you must be color blind. Plus you must have time to learn what all those settings do and to test the changes. So I just did what I usually do, I changed the less as possible of the default theme, re-arranging the bar and adding a more colorful wallpaper.

Meanwhile I have quit with:
1. Slackware based distros because they seem to be incompatible with my video card. Otherwise I would recommend Salix.
2. Crunchbang, openbox based and Debian derivative, fails during the installation for some reason.
3. Arch based distros are true rolling, updates every day and each time they can break the system, plus you must install everything or at least part of the software by hand as above. Too extreme for me.
Everything else is just too bloated.

I blogged about Ubuntu because I was in the middle of one of my periodical trials with Linux distros. The result was once again disheartening. Everything and I mean everything, is broken in Linux. And when it is not broken, they think it is boring and they break it. Up from the kernel to the instant messenger. You are always looking for updates in the futile search of fixing bugs but while one is fixed two other are introduced. Backwards compatibility is unknown. Unneeded and often radical changes. Ambitions that are way above the available resources, which leads to poor quality and half finished things. One distro fails to install, another installs but the video is broken, on another you can't install some piece of software you really need, or everything seems fine until you open some application that eats all your CPU and/or hangs the system. You think of a catastrophic failure, Linux distros have them all and probably some you can't think of.

So I have repeated my usual loop, I start with best intentions, crash again and again against reality, then I sadly switch back to Windows and I think "whoa, who ever can even compare the two things?". Yes, Linux doesn't aim to be a cheap copy of Windows. It just aims to be useless. The amusing part is how many people enjoy the pain. I have read a recent blog post where a guy was telling how the difficulties in using Linux have made him a better person.

It translates something like "who persists wins".
I managed to install Xubuntu on my old PC. I had to use the network install.
Pity it is almost impossible to use any software because of too few RAM.
Screen resolution required manual intervention but at least it did not gave errors on boot.
Now I am trying Lubuntu, but I am not much optimist.

Edit: installed Lubuntu. It is very minimalistic and better suited than Xubuntu for my machine. But I also found a big issue. If I open Synaptic and perform any task, CPU goes 100% and never get released. From Task Manager is seems something wrong with "python" process. Same happens with Update Manager.

So I have got this old PC and I wanted to install some Linux distro on it to give it away. No way.
After a whole day trying and trying several distros I finally gave up and installed an old Win2K disk I had in a drawer. The most annoying thing ever of Linux distros is the X11 - Xorg auto-discovery and auto-setting that does not work at all or picks a too high or too low resolution. The related font rendering is also annoying.
Distros that failed to install:
Xubuntu - asked to insert CD to install Grub while I was installing from Alternate CD. Tried the Live CD that spit errors few moments after boot (it works on the laptop then).
Salix - this was the only one that allowed to install and boot into an user session, pity it kept complaining of X wrong settings and kept probing the monitor at every boot, plus I could not set the splash at the same resolution as the user session. Fonts were either huge or too small.
Zenwalk - could not configure X at the end of install.

In Windows you get it installed with a basic resolution, that allows you to pick 640x480 or 800x600 and few colors, then you can install the proper driver for your motherboard and once installed you can reconfigure resolution, color depth and refresh frequency. Once it is set, it is kept since the log in screen and across the user sessions.

In Linux you must manually edit a "conf" text file (which is not easy if the system does not boot).
I hope things are easier with more recent hardware.

Note for those vintage hardware lovers out there: when you install Win2k you can't update the system unless you install Service Pack 4 and Internet Explorer 6 before connecting to Microsoft Update.

I've found on http://www.ehow.com this procedure you may find useful for dealing with bad sectors on Linux systems:

Download and burn Ubuntu to a DVD. If you have another Linux system or Live CD that can access the hard drive, you may skip this step.

1. Restart the computer and boot from the DVD or alternate system.

2. Open a terminal window.

3. Type "fdisk -l" (without the quotation marks) to see the hard drive and partition device names. This displays the hard drives and partitions on your system. Make a note of the hard drive or partition you want to scan for the "e2fsck" command. Please note the parameter after the command is a lower-case "L."

4. Type the following command: sudo e2fsck -cfpv /dev/sdb2. Replace "sdb2" with your actual device name, this can be an entire drive, such as "sda" or a partition, such as "sda1."

The parameters have the following meanings: "c" searches for bad blocks and adds them to the list, "f" forces a check on the file system, "p" repairs anything that can be safely repaired and "v" is verbose mode so you can see the command progress.
The "e2fsck" command can take a long time to run, even several hours on a particularly large drive.

5. Exit the terminal after the "e2fsck" command is finished.
Remove the DVD/CD if any and reboot the system. Your file system is up to date with any bad sectors and will avoid them; any repairable issues have been fixed.

By Mark Pool, eHow Contributor