I've got an old machine with no ethernet port, and I've got some sort of adapter with a serial port on one end and an ethernet plug on the other. What distro would best recognize this hardware, and would it run well on OLD machines.

I would burn a Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux Live cd and try both out in live mode to see if it will work. Deli Linux is another option. I am guessing as you have given no specs, machine and model number, and old machine is an opinion depending on user. I have internet access on a Compaq Armada 1540DM Pentium 1, 80 mb ram, 1.7 gig hard drive using Damn Small Linux 4.0. I also installed Puppy 2.15CE on it and it was also internet accessible but ran slower than DSL. Hence the switch.

The machine is a thinkpad running 98, Pentium 2 processor, 6 gig hard drive, half gig of ram.

Both Distros I mentioned earlier will run fine on your machine. I would go with Puppy as you have plenty of ram to handle it. Like I said, for the price of 1 cdrw or 2 cdr you can download and burn them and try them out.

[quote=zsporing]The machine is a thinkpad running 98, Pentium 2 processor, 6 gig hard drive, half gig of ram.[/quote] With 512MB of RAM, you could very well run a less barebones distribution, like Xubuntu, or even Debian. As for the ethernet adapter, what model/brand is it? can you post a picture of it? It is possible that it is just a "normal" internal network card with a custom connector to improve portability.

Yeah, about puppy, I booted it once, and running in ram it was pretty slow, so I turned it off to try a different X server. Now when I boot it off the same disc, it only displays "ISOLINUX 3....." Other machines boot fine off of this disc. Why is this?

ubuntu starter kit .then go from there .