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I tested recent Opera, Seamonkey and Firefox in 384 and then 128MB RAM in 
Puppy Linux 4.31 and MicroXP 0.83.

Puppy Linux
                               384MB            128MB
Opera 11 - about:blank          80MB             25MB
          youtube playing      100MB             54MB
On a 1GHz computer, youtube was quite usable (very slight jerkiness
and cpu usage up to 104% sometimes).  Opera obviously adjusts its memory 
usage (cache?) for low-ram computers and is usable in 128MB with swap.
Puppy Linux was not loaded into RAM, and it used 23MB.

Firefox 3.6 youtube playing     125MB           125MB?

It took a very long time to load and unload Firefox 3, with memory usage 
running about 200%, and when it attempted to play, 250%.  Impossibly 
jerky.

Conclusion:  If you use linux on a 128MB computer don't use Firefox, use 
Opera (or Seamonkey 1 gtk1).

MicroXP - uses 65MB not running programs (more than Puppy)

                                384MB           128MB total RAM

Opera 11        speed dial       97MB            42MB
                about:blank      88MB            43MB
                youtube home     94MB            60MB
                youtube play    120MB            83MB

Seamonkey 2     about:blank      50MB            48MB
                youtube home     56MB            57MB
                youtube play     83MB            80MB

Firefox 4       about:blank      76MB            78MB ?
                youtube home     81MB            61MB
                youtube play     87MB            75MB

The Firefox figure was obtained by adding memory for Firefox and Plugin 
(flash).  The plugin is 10MB and stays in RAM even after you leave 
Youtube, so subsequent sites used 10MB extra.

Conclusions:

1.  In MicroXP opera 11 reduces its memory usage on low-ram computers by 
up to 55MB.  Seamonkey and Firefox reduce by up to 10MB. They end up using 
about the same amount of memory (within 10MB) and are all usable with 
youtube.

2.  In Puppy Linux, Opera reduces memory usage on low-ram computers by up 
to 65MB and can play youtube (occasionally using 104% of RAM).  Firefox 3 
uses 200-250% of memory and loads and unloads excruciatingly slowly and is 
useless especially for youtube.  Seamonkey 1 GTK1 uses much less RAM and 
also plays youtube.  Seamonkey 2 is like Firefox - memory hog.  I did not 
try Opera 9 with Youtube since 11 works.

Therefore if you have 128MB RAM and 1GHz or faster, to play youtube online 
you can use Puppy Linux with Seamonkey 1 or Opera 11 (or earlier) but not 
Firefox 3 or Seamonkey 2.  Or use MicroXP with any of these three recent 
browsers.  Firefox appeared to use 8MB less than Opera to play.

Opera 11 has interesting extensions (new).

Either OS can dual boot with Basiclinux using lilo as described earlier.
A simple way to dual boot is to shrink XP (gparted on a live CD or 
PQMAGIC), make an ext2 hda2 and install basiclinux, then boot from a 
floppy disk to hda2 (C:) and use loadlin (or install lilo to floppy disk).
Or from a DOS boot CD (downloadable isos online).  Tinycore linux will 
also boot with lilo (not loadlin) and runs the latest browsers.

Puppy you2pup youtube downloader seems to be broken - it downloads error 
messages instead of mp4s.  There is some site (see archives) which can be 
used to download youtube videos to play with mplayer in BL2.  Most of the 
others require java to function.  youtube-dl for linux needs python.

Sindi