I've got this oldish laptop, a pentium 2, 400mhz 192 mb RAM, a few gigs o' memory and well, I'm wondering which version of which distro I should be leaning to. I'm new to Linux ( although not so new to Unix ) and would like an easy install and a relatively lean and mean system - stable is the key.

I'd appreciate any input....

Thanks in advance...

If you are rather familliar to Unix, I strongly recomend Slackware 9.0 since slack is the most unix-like distro out there. It seems a little scary to install but is not really that bad. It is also *very* good on lower spec machines- one of my favorites.

If you want something *really* easy to install, use, and configure, try Mandrake 9.1, or SuSe. They are two of the *easiest* distros to use - probably rivaling XP in many ways. They are, however, a little harsh on lower speed machines and you can not get SuSE as a free ISO download (you can get it free via FTP install, but I have never figured out how to get it to work).

Go to http://www.linuxiso.org , this site has many Linux ISO downloads available (for free) as well as general discriptions and links to the Distro's homepage..

try slackware 9.0 , it's not that hard to install and it's really stable.

I would go with Slackware 9

Yeah, forget I said mandy or suse - go slack. You will learn to love it's layout. It is lean, dumps a lot of the bloat, excelent hardware support, and is actually the easiest to configure "manually" (most setup and configure scripts are located in one neat little place ) .

For the least problems, just select "full install" - it is only like 1.8 gigs and is the safest way to be sure you are not missing anything.

Hmmm...

I suppose since it's and old machine that I don't really use much anymore, I might as well use it to cut my teeth on the big linux cookie. I was leaning towards suse or red hat, but I've already got an os x machine. All signs point to Slackware, although I'm still considering debian...

It depends, slackware may not be a good distro on a laptop although if you are experienced with unix than you should give it a try. I would recommend redhat linux to you.