Old laptop

[Dark_Phoenix]

I have an old Dell laptop that I use just for traveling with. It has win98se installed (which I hate) and I was looking at installing a new OS. I realy don't want to pay for the winxp license so I was looking into some of the free OS's out there such as Ubuntu. Only problem is that this laptop is running a PII 233, 80m memory (upgradable to 144 if I can find it) and a 4 gig hdd. Ubuntu states that it needs at least 256m ram and 4 gig hdd space, so this is out.
I was also looking into Debian / Linux but I just don't know much about any of these.
Are there any other OS's out there that this machine will run? All I am interested in is web browsing and some light word processing and file storage.

[Dark_Phoenix]

I found this one, http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/, that looks promising. Anyone have any experience with it?

[michaelp]

Look for Puppy Linux. It also is supposed to work okay on slow systems. Try DSL (Damn Small Linux) or Puppy Linux. They are both Live CD's, so you can test them without installing them.

[Wraithan]

I used DSL for a while on a system similar to yours, ran really well unless I tried to compile something large like MySQL. I never tried Puppy but I have heard it is just as good.

[lightatdawn]

I ran DSL on a desktop box with very simular specs to your laptop and was totally amazed. The speed and ease I was able to use it with really put into perspective the amount of bloat in your standard MS OS. Try it and you'll see.

[Dark_Phoenix]

So I have DSL running on my laptop now, and so far its great. Only problem is that the desktop size is too big to fit on the display. Anyone know how to adjust the desktop size to fit?

[dwks]

You mean, the screen resolution is too big for your screen, such that it extends off the edge of your screen?

If that's the case, try searching using the keyword "resolution": http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=...G=Search&meta=
It looks like you can select the screen resolution when you first install: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/6418/3/
A few places also suggested running "xsetup.sh", to get back into the configuration. I'm not sure where that is, but perhaps you can find it.

[Dark_Phoenix]

Thanks, I got it figured out. It was just a matter of playing with it until I found a resolution that actually worked with this old monitor. Windows used 1024x768 with no problem so that is what I was trying to use. But I ended up having to use 800x600