[linux-audio-user] (very) low-end recording solution

Hi I've a friend who's planning to record lessons for the language courses they teach but doesn't know a great deal about computers and seemingly only has access to very old hardware. I was wondering if anyone else has experience in using linux audio on win-98/me era machines, and could point me at a distro or any packages that would be useful for a (very) low-end recording solution for the beginner. Recommending new hardware isn't completely out of the question (I think an external HDD and a CD writer is a bare minimum, and we'll be buying a mic of course), but I'd rather get them up & running with as little extra expense as possible. I've been using Agnula & now 64studio for the last few years but I mostly work in Csound/Blue and SC, so I have slightly skewed view of the linux audio world :-/ Thanks all.