On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:45:56 +1300, Fisher, Robert (FXNZ CHC) > Gareth might disagree 'cos I think he runs a minimalist Gentoo laptop on > similar specs.
Indeed. A P166 with 32MB of ram should go just fine with a light window manager :) When I started using linux this was a relatively good machine (I had a P200 which cost around the $4k mark). In recent years things like KDE have gained significat bloat, but all the light window managers still work just fine. I would strongly recommend fluxbox or blackbox. Use opera instead of mozilla (or links :) , abiword instead of OO Writer, slypheed or mutt instead of kmail/evolution..... <flamesuit on>... vi instead of emacs ;) For a distribution I'd suggest going with Debian. Gentoo is nice and all, but it helps if you have a faster machine you can run distccd on :) Cheers, Gareth