Daily Doings at the Line of Death Bar & Grill

Just rescued two old (Pentium III) machines with Xubuntu 8.04 (one's a laptop, one's a desktop, both have about 256MB RAM, though I hope to find a couple of 256MB sticks for the desktop). I'd like to scavenge a P-IV machine to try later distros (and main line Ubuntu, which uses a bit more resources than X). Unity doesn't sound fun, though I suspect that, like Microsoft's Ribbon interface, it's easy enough to learn if you don't have prior knowledge getting in the way.