Hi there

Okay, I’ve an old Medion laptop with the following specs:

Intel Pentium III
500 MHz Processor
256 Mb RAM
40 Gb Fujitsu HDD
External USB Mouse
External USB Keyboard
External DVD Reader/CD RW

Currently it’s running on dual boot with Windows 98SE and SuSE 9.1 – the problem now, however, is that as a laptop it’s pretty obsolete, although I’d like to save it.

My major question is, if I were to put the whole laptop under Linux, would I be able use a USB wireless dongle to connect to wireless broadband and basically just use the laptop for surfing the net and using OpenOffice for example?

Also, seeing the low specs, what would be a good distro? I was thinking of Ubuntu.

Much appreciated,
Thanks

Yes, assuming you had a USB WiFi adapter that is supported under Linux. It doesn't matter how powerful the machine is.

As Ubuntu is a very resource-intensive distribution, it would be a pretty bad choice for a low end machine. Xubuntu would be an improvement, but personally I would go with Slackware (or one of it's derivatives) or straight Debian and optimize as much as possible. That laptop is much more powerful than my current full-time laptop that is running Slackware 11.0 (with FluxBox), and I'm very happy with it.