[ale] low-memory distros?

[brian at polibyte.com (Brian Pitts)]

Jeffrey B. Layton wrote:
> Afternoon,
> 
> On to a new subject... I may inherit my wife's laptop and I'm thinking
> of installing a distro on it to take with me when I travel. The laptop
> is a bit old - 6 years (Sotec 3120X) but it's the perfect size (12" screen
> and 4.4 lbs.). The specs on it look pretty good but It's only got 384 MB
> of memory and some it is used for the GPU (nominally 32MB but
> could be 64MB).  So I've got a couple of questions:
> (1) What distro would you recommend that has a window manager
> and OpenOffice? (I can always install Openoffice later).

384 should be able to run anything, really. Someone has already 
suggested Arch; I haven't used that but I can recall good reports about 
it on this list. Recently I've used Zenwalk 5, another Slackware 
derivative, and been impressed. It doesn't install Openoffice by default 
but packages are available.

> (2) What wireless PC Card do people recommend that works with
> Linux but doesn't require ndiswrapper?

Look for something with an ralink chip. The ASUS WL-107 is one example. 
I was pleasantly surprised to find the source code for the linux driver 
  on its CD alongside the windows driver.

-Brian