I just got the latest and greatest Simply Mepis (3.3.2 test 3) running on a 133MHz P1 with 70MB of RAM. Mepis stepped back their power management and it helped over test 1 and 2. Power management works and I now consider the laptop useful. It goes to sleep when I close the lid and wakes up when I open it. I have not and probably won't try Open Office on it, but it's there!
I did the install by surrogate, using a 1 GHz Athlon for the actual install then moving the hard drive and fixing one config file. In XF86Config-4, I changed the driver from nv to vesa and toned down the default screen to 800x600 and 8 bits depth. PCMCIA and networking worked without modification. Some of it's faster than Sarge on the same computer. X starts slower but much on the command line works faster. All I had to work with, however, is raw X and kde. I did not try kde but the kicker on it's own took forever to start up. Lots of X packages, including wmaker, are broken in unstable now. It looks like they are changing out X.
