I am a newbie at Linux. I have a friend giving me 2 older boxes one is a Win98 ther other has Win XP (SP1) . For the Win 98 I have chosen DSL as it has a small hard drive and it seems easy to learn based off the live CD. The other Box I would like to install  Ubuntu 6.06LTS . I have a Live CD of it and I like the way it looks and runs off my  laptop. I 
was curious if this would be a wise distro to install   on this machine or choos
e another flavor for that machine(That will be easy to learn and connect to the internet via broadband cable). I don't think it has a lot of ram but can't remember.I looked at it a few months ago .
Any suggestions would be appreciated  . Want to learn more about programming but need to take baby steps as there is 
no local support that I know of.

For the Win98 box, don't use DSL. It's only really good for live CDs, and very minimalistic setups. A better choice that would run on the Win98 box would probably be PCLOS. For the other machine, unless you're running a machine that you need to not have to install OS updates for a while, I would try Ubuntu 7.10.

Madman6510, I see you have VLC listed. I've been trying to
find someway to play music from Shoutcast free radio and
cannot do it.
I'm using Ubuntu 7.10 and have given it permission to use
the entire computer so there's no Windows influence.
Will VLC work? I see where the download is etc. I would also
like to keep Rhythm box but it won't play Shoutcast radio.
It might even be an infringement issue, I don't know. Any help
would be appreciated.

Edit: I've reinstalled Mepis 6.5 over Ubuntu and now use Shoutcast
as before. Who knows, I may switch back to Ubuntu.

As VLC can play just about any audio/video format, it should work with your music. But for you, just try looking up VLC in the Add/Remove interface, it's a lot easier that way.

Success....using Ubuntu 7.04, I tried looking up VLC in the Add/Remove interface but
was unable to find it. However I did find XMMS. I activated it, waited for it to make the
changes and I now have exactly what I want. I can now listen to music and work on
the computer....thanks for the hint about the Add/Remove, never thought of that and
certainly didn't think XMMS would be there.

Hay there eaglehorse
here are what are considered the min requirements PCLOS 2007
* 4 GB of free disk space
Note: This is for installation. To just try the Live CD you don't need any free space.
* 256 MB of memory
* a CD-ROM drive
* An i686 CPU (Pentium Pro, Celeron, Pentium II or better)

and suggested specs
* 8 GB of free disk space
* 512 MB of memory
* a CD or DVD drive
* a network card (NIC)
* a high speed internet connection
(for new software and updates)

I am quite happy with PCLOS. I don't use Compiz Fusion as it takes better graphics than I have (64mb on board) for the full 3d effects. Have never worried about WiFi as I don't do wireless or laptops, but you could check here to see if the others have any problems with it or laptops.
I used DSL (2.2 ? and last used 4.1, as live only )mostly a couple years ago on a 350k6 with 128mb mem,and will work down to a i386 processor, and it's only gotten better I believe at the Current version: 4.2.5. Always wanted to try a frugal install, Alot of people there think it's the way to go, just never did it as I always saved my prefs. to a floppy or towards the end a "thumb" drive. If you do a regular Install DSL it's supposed to become a stripped down version of Debian basically , of which I suspect you could build it into as big a distro as you wanted. (You would probably want to upgrade the kernel to a 2.6 one from the 2.4 one it uses now). If you're just wanting to "play" around and learn alot along the way I guess that would be one way to do it. or you could just look into Sidux if you wanted to go with something Debian with KDE as default
you might like to read some here
http://linux-newbie.sunsite.dk/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/
plus what ever distro you chose be sure to check out there forum as well
hope you have fun

Thank you for the suggestions. I am not sure that the HD is big enough it is an old win 98 box. I might have to find a bios for it should be a fun adventure. the other one I need to swap cd drives to get it up and running but thought of infecting the windows xp or 2000 first to see what the infections do for some odd reason fasinates me.

eaglehorse, why are you considering ubuntu 6.06? Its a bit long in the tooth. Ubuntu is maturing rapidly and each release is significantly better than the previous. I suggest you try 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).