Give me your Suggestions for OS

[Spleeze]

OK, here's the deal. I'm getting this laptop, a thinkpad 570 with a pentium II 366 and 128megs of ram. What OS do YOU think I should run on it?

I want to surf the web, use an instant messaging client, maybe listen to some mp3's over a network, stuff like that. Nothing heavy duty at all.

So here was what im thinking. Either install some form of linux(thinking slackware 10 or vector linux) with a minimal WM like fluxbox or something, or installing Win2000 and ripping explorer out for something like bb4win and use an alternative file manager like a43

So this is basically whats happening. What would you recommend for a basic, but still funtional system. Go nuts.

 

[Spleeze]

anybody?

 

[n0cmonkey]

No need to bump yet.

Either option would be fine. If you don't mind spending a couple of bucks, more ram wouldn't hurt.

 

[ugopk]

slackware with xfce should be great..

I have a pIII 500 laptop with 64 mb of ram. I installed Fedora core 2 last week running KDE and it runs like crap. KDE took like 5 minutes to start. Once I installed XFCE, it flys... sort of haha

 

[lucrioual]

Go with slackware if you wannna run linux, but if you want windows, try 2000. Avoid XP at all costs, not worth the time to load and everything.

 

[Spleeze]

Does anyone have any experience with alternative shells for windows? Maybe I should make a thread asking that specific question....

 

[BurnItDwn]

though this is probably not what you want to here, I am going too also recommend Slackware.
It's very easy to install and for me the install is quicker than a 2k or xp install.
If you don't know anything about *nix you can just use X and not really need to know much.
If you want to learn about it, or understand it, the unix man files are great. Also there are thousands of online faqs, howtos, and various other references. Give it a try, if you don't like it you can always install windows in its place.