What distro would you suggest for an old laptop with a slow Pentium I chip. All it needs to do is surf the internet with my wireless card and *maybe* create some text documents.

Debian might be a good bet. I've found it very user friendly and it is known to be frugal on space - you can unload pretty much everything you don't need, which is good news for a machine with a small hard drive.

TIM

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Seconded. I run libranet 2.8.1 on a P1 (166mhz) as a backup machine. Its not "something I'd like to use all day" because the p1 is slow for a GUI, but if you have enough RAM (128MB is fine for me) it will be usable at a pinch (except for things like Tux racer and GIMP which will never run on such a machine.) This is because it has the light-weight ICE window manager.
Last time I looked it was available for free download, but check if your CD-ROM drive will read 700MB CDs first. It is a good install for laptops.
naps

This is a GoBook2 with 32mb of ram. SHould I use an older version on Debian or find the latest?

I run Mandrake9.1 on a P150MMX laptop with 32MB RAM. (Toshiba 300CDS)

Yves.

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'fraid you won't be able to run a GUI on that. I guess the hard drive is less than 2MB? That would also need upgrading. That machine is/was running Win9x which is a good OS for limited hardware; I reckon that the move toward higher specs has put Linux on an equal footing with later OSs from MS as they have grown in their demands (Linux started off as a server type OS) but that is now and we are talking about then.
So to install "back then" type OS, you could run a command line system only and spend time installing command line apps (you really could do anything you want this way, even web browsing limited to text). Libranet will install a minimal system in less than 500MB (suggest you use an older version than 3.8.1 if you need to use an older CD ROM). But if you want to use Debian (Libranet is based on Debian but is not Debian as you get from the Debian project; it has a lot more work put into it) you could put together anything you like. I'm sure you are aware that Debian as such (not Libranet) has a well deserved fearsome reputation for being difficult for newbies to install...
So it depends what you want/expect.
Good luck
Naps

Well maybe I should not have said a GUI would not run, but I bet it doesn't run fast! Anyway my personal preference is for Libranet over MDK, though MDK does have a well deserved reputation for installing easily on laptops etc. How big is your hard drive?
Naps

Hi naps,

My harddrive is 2GB, which is enough for me. Here's the way I did:
Upon install, I unchecked everything. So Mandrake detected this and asked if I wanted:
- 1) Minimal with X
- 2) Minimal without X
- 3) Real minimal without even package management (65MB or so in total).
I chose option 1, and asked for starting in runlevel 3 (text).
Next, I added things when needed (with Mandrake's uprmi tools, it's as easy as the well-known Debian's apt-get).

My laptop curently runs Matchbox as the window manager, and it is so usable, that I'm thinking of starting the GUI upon boot.

Yves.