Hi,
I'm looking for a distro to set up on my laptop, an Acer Aspire 1302XV, AMD 1600+, 256 RAM, 20GB, HD, S3 TwisterK (ProSavage)gfx. My problem is that I don't know which distro I should choose. I would like it to be a very light weight type of deal with not too much eye candy, but at the same time I don't want to spend weeks just getting it up and running. It should therefore be fairly easy configurable, as I'm very new to Linux. The system will mainly be running Office apps. and webbrowser. Any comments and thoughts on this is much appreciated. Thanks.

Take this linux distribution test

http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/index.php

I was about to say SuSE 9.3 Pro when I saw you are not too much looking for eye candy. But it still is a very decent bet. Give it a try. It is a real desktop Linux distro. People say Xandros is also very user friendly though I havent used it.

But if you insist on lightweight I can tell you about the great Debian. Eventhough you would take a little more (than SuSE or Fedora) in the end it is very customizable and powerful. And it is really stable (if you install the stable branch) and on-line upgrading is easy. I don't want to recommend Ubuntu (or Kubuntu), but it is also an option. Its based on Debian and quite good.

Vector Linux is based on Slackware and is lightweight, but you might have to search for some packages (probably not OpenOffice). On the other hand packages for Fedora and other RH and RH alternatives are easier to find.

To find detailed information about these please visit the appropriate web sites and DistroWatch.

Funny :-) The test suggested Ubuntu as #1 . I've already tried that, though. It IS really easy, but for some reason it runs really slow, even though I've installed the DRI for my otherwise unsupported gfx. I have a quite awesome desktop machine which runs Ubuntu successfully, but somehow, considering the applications I was planning on running, it just seems as if there might be a better deal in terms of customizability for my laptop. I've looked at Gentoo. Might in fact not be that easily configured, but maybe I should give it a try. Have you had any experiences with that distro?

I haven't tried Gentoo. But in near future I would. I know one guy who runs Gentoo on his Laptop. Anyway he's a Linux Guru. But I think your desicion makes a lot sense.

Give Debian also a try.

If you thinking about Gentoo, try Archlinx or Crux Linux. Both are lightweight and customizable to your liking. And won't take as long to setup as Gentoo.