I wanted to try squeeze+sid on this PC which was given to me by someone who was going to send it to the scrapheap but installation failed due to a problem caused by the UUIDs not getting recognized. However, I found an unofficial sidux live CD, installable to the hard drive, available here where I downloaded the icewm-sid-lite-iso It uses the Debian 2.6.26-1-486-kernel which is appropriate for AMD-K6. The default icewm desktop was much faster than LXDE.
A second solution (IMO better) I tried and which also directly uses Debian "testing" repositories is antix, and also has the appropriate 486 kernel. This "testing" antiX iso comes with no X and it says on the linked site that the the best way to get X is:
Code: Select all
# apt-get update
# apt-get install xorg
Code: Select all
apt-get install firmware-linux
apt-get install xorg xserver-xorg
So my conclusion is that both the sidux and antix solution demonstrate that Debian squeeze+sid+icewm are, or will be, an ideal combination for this old computer.