I have a computer here at work that i can use for whatever ..
it has to be wireless. cause we have wireless cable modems here at work for testing.

specs are
400mhz celeron
128mb of ram
4gb hdd


at home i have or am using mandrake 10.1 official and i have suse 9.1 pro

and i just received in the mail Ubuntu from their website. (it was free and free shipping)

i played with live.. but it ran slow due to pc having a 24x cdr


i want to have room to surf the net (firefox of course)
gaim for instant messenging
no email cause i have my internal box for email

This is asked about 3 times every day!!! Just go to http://distrowatch.com/ and find one that you need

Mandrake or Suse will work fine since that is what you have. I have installed Mandrake on a number of older systems.

When doing the install, do not install OpenOffice as it requires a lot of resources. As well, install iceWM for the window manager. KDE and Gnome are great but use a lot of system resources.

how different is ice from kde. i dont like the feel of gnome

iceWM is very light and but gives you most of what you need. You can consider it as a lean and mean desktop.

You can install both KDE and ice and then try switching between the desktops once logging in. KDE gives you some very cool features such as adding on 3rd party tools to make it look similar to the mac OS. But again it would slow down your 400Mhz celeron.

I like using ice on older systems because the task bar is well designed and it does the job. After installing Mandrake, go into the drake tools for installing software, then search all descriptions for iceWM. You will find a few packages for configuring ice and selecting many different desktop styles.

great now i gotta find out which theme i like ..
so far i like
crux teal and qnx ice wm
ill probably end up with crux teal

You could also try xfce4 it's got a nice gui but very light when compared to GNOME and KDE.

Linux~Powered; no need to get stroppy, this is the newbie section remeber!!

SO, you're that new that you don't know how to use the search page? It's there for a reason