Suggestion for best Distro to put onto an old laptop

[faintdreams]

I have an ancient (but otherwise fully functional) Toshiba laptop. It is a Satillite 220CDS.

I want to use it as a stand alone writing machine, (with ability ti save to a usb stick), and I think that Linux is probably the best way to go, but I am unsure which linux distro would be the least amount of hassle to install.

The gui doesn't have to be too snazzy (I've used fluxbox before so I'm not afraid of minimalism), but whatever I use it has to support a competent word processing package

My google fu is failing me so I welcome any suggestions.

Thanks (in advance)

Faintdreams

Duh posted to personal journal and no community one  !

Comments

[kerravonsen]

I second the suggestion of Xubuntu; Xfce is a reasonably lightweight desktop environment. Or you could install Xubuntu and then replace Xfce with something even lighter like fluxbox or fvwm-crystal.

Remove Firefox, however, because it is a memory hog and will slow down your machine like whoa. I'm not sure what the best lightweight browser would be to use, though.

If you find that your laptop simply has not enough grunt or memory to cope with X, then you'll have a problem, since I doubt that there are any non-X wordprocessing packages around. However, plain text editors such as Vim or Emacs do have many plugins that could help. Also, there are a number of progams around which use the framebuffer, so you could have some graphical things while not running X.

Also, screen is your friend. Also, dvtm is pretty awesome too.

[swisscelt]

I like Chrome. I use it on my netbook running Ubuntu with no problems.

Having said that, I'd consider lynx for a machine with 16 MB RAM. That is, if I needed to get content from the web at all. X windows would be a pain, yes, but there are still plenty of things one can do from the ol' command line.