[LBo] Problem with finding the right distro

[Allen]

Hi,

I'm trying to install any distro that is complete enough for an 
after school program run for the housing project kids at the gym 
nearby. I got 8 old PCs donated which were running W2K but the 
guy who runs the program doesn't have the skill to keep them up.

My idea is that with the right distro he can just pop a live CD 
in and do a fresh install when they bomb, which they will given 
that the kids have no exposure to computers and range in age from 
5 up to about 13.

I've tried a bunch of distros and had miserable results so far. 
The boxes are AMD K6 - 2+/270MHz with 256 Megs of ram.

Knoppix 3.81 runs fine as a live distro, but is old and cranky 
for an install. I don't know enough to update the newer apps and 
make a new distro package at this point.

Knoppix 5.1 just hangs and won't boot as a live CD.

PCLinuxOS 2007 just black boxes.

Xubuntu 7.04, which I'm running on an old P3 just fine, hangs in 
the boot process and never sees the mouse.

Simply Mephis runs fine as a live CD, it installed and ran fine, 
but when I attempt to login on a reboot I get an error message:
------------
"There was an error setting up inter process communications for KDE.

Could not read network connection list.

/root/.DCOPserver_Potrero Hill Study 1_0

Please check that the "dcopserver" program is running."
-------------
When I click on the "OK" button it goes back to a cold start, 
checks the memory, etc. I don't know the install command to 
override the "silent" option so I can't see the boot process.

The machines are old, 2001, and slow, but they do run W2K just 
fine on 128 megs of ram, so I'm puzzled why I can't get a Linux 
distro to work.

Does anyone have a clue for me, or can you suggest a distro that 
will work as a live CD and then do a clean install?

Thanks,

Allen