I could do 99% of my job effectively on a ~200MHz Pentium with maybe 64MB of RAM. About the only thing that would really bite me is the occasional need to help the client team, which often means booting Windows in a VM and replicating their comparatively bloated development environment.
I was using a 633MHz PIII until about 3 y ago, then using it again recently when my main computer died, and its gotten a lot harder (on Linux) over those 3 y.
No, ubuntu specifically on that machine. The only tricky part as I can see it should be the webbrowser. You'd either have to use an old one, or a featureless one.
I was using an old one (Firefox 1.5) and it was extremely painful with Amazon.com. Amazon.com seems to have changed in the 3 years since I used it last with that browser.
I always thought that a "featureless" one (one without modern JS or CSS) would be extremely painful or useless, too.
