We haven't really tried to specify a minimum spec on which we want this to run, we have discussed the need for something that uses as few of resources as possible in the hope that it will run on most machines. Our main audience for this will be people working in Health and development in Tanzania, probably mostly in government or NGO offices, and they will have a variety of types of equipment. Some could be similar to the spec. you mention, but there have also been a number of initiatives to improve the availability of PCs here (incl. distribution of PCs to districts and the lifting of VAT from the sale of PCs) so I am also hoping that most of the people for whom we want to provide access to the data will have machines with a reasonable spec.

The idea is for the application to work pretty much like a kiosk (I think) so we don't need much (any?) of the functionality that KDE/GNOME add. The browser can also be very simple: I tested Dillo (very light, astonishingly fast) but it doesn't seem to be able to handle some aspects of our application (something to do with sessions I think).

So, we are going for a light-weight window manager and light-weight browser. Mike is going to try out various combinations to see what provides the best performance.

In our office we have quite a range of machines, including a few 350Mhz machines with 32Mb of RAM. When we have a demo to play with I'll try it out on everything we have and report the results. When testing on some of the older machines I think I could have a lot of time for preparing my notes