There's an old laptop that I'm working with that we're just trying to get going enough to have the equivalent of Notepad and the ability to play mp3's OR ogg. If the mp3 part is hard, ogg will work as well.

This laptop is from, like 1998 or 1999. It's a Compaq Presario 1625.

I have no idea whether linux is even possible on something like that--it may be all proprietary hardware, but I don't know.

Well, I'm downloading Xubuntu in hopes that maybe that will work. I sure hope I can get the sound working. I just need it to do those things--the notepad MUST be gui-based, the person that will be operating this is not CLI friendly AT ALL. I'm doing this for a band--they want a computer they can use to play samples before and after songs, and to be able to use a notepad/wordpad when they need to take notes. A CLI interface will not work, I need a GUI.

Hello Kizzume

I think some sort of Linux will work on most things. I've got DSL (Damn Small Linux) working on a Laptop of about the same age as yours. Mine has 48MB of memory, 200MHz processor and 2GB hard disk.

That's certainly got a Word Processor and mp3 playback.

I don't think basic linux will be the problem, it's going to be the graphical environment you run on top of it. XFce which is on XUbuntu has lesser demands than the two main desktops but it will depend on just what you have in the machine as to what is possible.

So there shouldn't be too much problem with recognizing the audio I take it. Cool.

Ah, well, I'm not sure I'd go that far. Hardware is always a tricky thing in Linux and it depends if the distribution you settle on will recognise what you have in the machine.

XUbuntu with 100's of megabytes of data is going to have more chance of that than dsl with only 50. Still it's been impressive so far.