Reviving my laptop

I have an old laptop which I would hate to see go to waste, an Intel 796 megahertz processor with 128 megabytes of ram and the weight of Windows XP has become too much for it to bear. I want a system that will run quickly and smoothly. I need a web browser and programming tools (gcc, make, python, perl, svn, etc.) and an mp3 player might be nice too. I had been running OpenSUSE, but the performance was still a bit sluggish. Then I tried Damn Small Linux (DSL) and it had almost everything I need. Fluxbox is a great windowing system and it ran extremely well. Things started to break down when I tried to install make, a series of dependencies and library downgrades prevented me from being able to get everything I needed. The problems continued the more I tried to modify the system. So I've tried others, five distributions so far, but none seem to work just right. This is turning into quite the weekend project.