I'm retooling an old laptop (400mhz, 192mbram)
Currently it's running XP (that's how it came), but it runs like crap. I'm probably going to reformat and put a form of linux on it. I'll probably dual boot it with 98se for those times I need windows, but I hope to be running linux primarily. I was just looking for suggestions on a fast, small linux.

I'm looking at gentoo. I understand it'll be sort of a quest, but I'm curious enough and desire to learn more about how my system works.

Gentoo would be horrible on that, compiling on a 400mhz machine would literally take forever.

Debian gets my vote for this job.

See? I didn't even take the compile time into consideration!
I've used debian, but it was over 3 or 4 years ago. I'll check it out.

Try Debian or Ubuntoo or whatever it's called. Or Fedora.

Fedora is rpm-based, although with apt or yum, it's still pretty decent. It's one of my favourite distros.

Debian and Ubuntu are both great. Ubuntu is Debian based, but with a more closed set of apps available, although that can be fixed. Ubuntu has better hardware detection (for the latest stuff), although on an old machine, you probably wouldn't have to take that into consideration.

If Ubuntu detects and configures my ATi card, I'll consume a napkin. God I love napkins, a joyous celebration it shall be.

It can't install the drivers for you because of the licensing, but "apt-get install ati-drivers" takes care of that for you. I think that was the package name, but I just ran a search and installed what I came up with.

You're talking about a Radeon >8500, right?

Powercolor Radeon 9600 pro. Knoppix couldn't do it, nor could half a million other things I've tried. I'll test the live-cd version of Ubuntu tommorrow, is there any quick way I can benchmark my video performance, or confirm that it is using 3D hardware acceleration?

"glxinfo" in a console and check the first lines of output. You'll see "Direct rendering" and if it's set to "yes" then you're in business.

"glxgears" will give you an idea of your performance. The last ATI drivers have been giving crap framerates in glxgears, but the performance has improved considerably in-game. With your 9600 you should be getting around 2000 fps.

Use "apt-cache search ati" or something like that to find the package name and then "apt-get install package-name" to install it.

You might have to modify your X configs so that it loads the proper driver. Ubuntu uses XFree instead of X.org (for the love of God, do not ask me why), so load up /etc/X11/XFree86-4 (IIRC) and change the driver to "fglrx" and restart X. Or you can use ATI's utility "fglrxconfig" which also works very well and walks you through it, and also sets up the advanced settings for the card.

I don't know if you can do all of that from a LiveCD, I think you might need to be on a HD install for it to work.

The easiest distro to get my 9600xt working in was Gentoo though, although in Ubuntu it was basically install the driver with apt and make sure the config was ok.

I like Linux.

You know, putting "another" at the beginning of your thread title doesn't exactly give it a "click me" aura. :p

I figured the people who were going to reply would do so based solely on the "Linux" part of the thread

Also, I noticed debian had a network install option when I was reading up on it. What other distros offer that? My power adapter for my cd-drive died so I would like to be able to install this without having to wait till my next paycheck

I'd suggest debian.