One of my mates want to try a more advanced version of Linux (he is currently using Linux Mint), but he only have notebook to try it out, it has following hardware(I know off):
1.8GHz Core 2 Duo
1 GB of ram
500GB HDD @7200
I don't know the audio, graphics and wireless card
But I have no expericen Debian distrobutions which he kinda want to stay with for the time being :s
I have suggested Debian, but I kinda need others oppion to giver better advice on this subject
He could try his hand at Slackware, Gentoo, or Linux from scratch. But beware, all three require you to know what you're doing, since none has any "Are you sure you want to do that" safelocks in place.
Well then he should go back to the original and install Debian. But I don't know of any Debian-based distribution that's source-based. And as an exercise, he could try and make dpkg and apt run on those distros