you should be fine running X and a lightweight GUI, just be very careful what apps you choose to run, something like firefox would bring it to a crawl for sure
by itself, just running X and something like fluxbox or blackbox and your looking at needing about 40Mb or RAM, that would put you well into using the swap space at all times, its doable, but it wont be fast at all, text mode apps it would do quite well and if properly setup barely use the swap space much
some other things you can do, trim the TTY's down to like 1 or 2
keep services to a minimum even if they dont use CPU cycles when dormant they do use cache space
stay away from java anything
stay away from python anything if you can avoid it
compiled apps are good, interpreted code apps are bad, for example a browser like dillo will be quite fast, firefox or mozilla wont be at all and barely run
by itself, just running X and something like fluxbox or blackbox and your looking at needing about 40Mb or RAM, that would put you well into using the swap space at all times, its doable, but it wont be fast at all, text mode apps it would do quite well and if properly setup barely use the swap space much
some other things you can do, trim the TTY's down to like 1 or 2
keep services to a minimum even if they dont use CPU cycles when dormant they do use cache space
stay away from java anything
stay away from python anything if you can avoid it
compiled apps are good, interpreted code apps are bad, for example a browser like dillo will be quite fast, firefox or mozilla wont be at all and barely run