Hi all,

My girlfriend gave me an old Sony VAIO laptop (Z505LS) -- PIII, 192MB RAM, 20GB HD. It's dreck being junked from where she works, but it's new to me, and my first laptop, so I'm quite happy to have it. My intended use for this thing is primarily entertainment during air-travel (non-graphics intensive games, and DVDs ripped to the HD), possibly a GPS nav system, and checking email.

I tried stuffing SuSE 9.3 on it, since that's what I had handy, but it has difficulties installing. It refused to even load YaST2 until I upgraded the memory (stolen from another junker laptop she brought home), but it still seems to die from lack of memory while partitioning the drive.

Anyone have any recommendations on a linux distro that I can use that's reasonably light on resources? I can't find a good distro comparison chart on distrowatch.com. My first thought was Damn Small Linux, but that doesn't support PCMCIA cards, so it's useless on a laptop.

FWIW, I completed the partitioning after booting from a Knoppix CD, so I may give SuSE another whirl, but I wanted to throw the door open to other options, in case there's a distro out there that I'm not aware of, which is really, really good on older laptops.

Cheers,