I’m currently (laptopwise) on that HP G60 that came out with last black friday for 300$.

With Nvidia in the lead with making drivers for linux, hopefully manufacturers will make better drivers for their laptops. It runs well on linux though.. no problems with proprietary audio drivers installed.
Too bad it’s proprietary (and costs money) though..

Great way to save money.
Don’t do it for gramma though, or she will have someone come over and tell her to install windows. This happened to me.
After an entire DAY of netinstalling onto this 128mb RAM PoS system I crammed together for her.

I guess next time I’ll lock out booting from disk drive in BIOS. Muuahahaha

[…] my co-workers are happy owners of the HTC Incredible – a phone that is twice as fast as the junker laptop I’ve been messing around with lately. I think that stings the most. I totally want that […]

Just us Fluxbox as your window manager. The window manager is what actually is using your RAM resources, so you don’t need an entire new distro just a new window manager.

I ran it on your laptop’s bigger brother for about 5 years until it died of heat exhaustion (I was reapplying thermal grease every couple of weeks at one point.)

why not give windows nt a try?

Good suggestions everyone. Btw, DSL did not work. Or rather it worked beautifully but it could not figure out the touch pad and it made the cursor stuck at the bottom of the screen.

So far I think the winner is Debian Lenny with IceWM. It runs quite fast, and I installed Google Chrome as my browser which performs much better than IceWeasel.

Sadly, I lost the blue scroll button functionality :( There is probably a way to get it back but I haven’t figured that out yet.

Windows 2000 :)

…

No ? Then the latest Debian Stable would suit a barebone server perfectly. If you want to play around with new distros, old hardware isn’t the best testing platform.

As some already said: Arch Linux.. Floats your boat, whatever it is.

Or go experimental and use Haiku OS :)

The CD player is probably a standalone that uses the same disk drive and audio port the computer uses, so the little LCD screen is not meant to interact with the OS. That way someone could listen to music with the computer shut down, taking advantage of the laptop battery. A friend of mine had a laptop like this, but with a standalone DVD player built-in.

That’s just my guess.

I don’t know what you intend to use the machine for, but if you want something more lightweight you could try going with a BSD. Even if there was a wireless card to worry about, I know OpenBSD has some good wireless card support.

You mentioned installing from an Ubuntu minimal CD (I think?). That’s what I do with Debian on low-powered systems. I use the Debian netinst CD, installing just the base system (no X, not even SSH), then apt-get everything I want from the bottom up.

I’ve actually used a very similar one not long ago (256MB Ram, though), but I’ve installed Debian with Fluxbox and it ran fine.

One thing, though: Firefox is not for those machines anymore. Maybe Epiphany or Midori.

Now I use mine has a home file and webserver running Debian Stable.

Trying a minimal Arch Linux system with Openbox or something similar would be great. It’s really rewarding getting your system set up exactly how you want it, not determined by the distro. It also means that it’ll be fast on old machines if you’re using lightweight software.