[zmatt]

I'm buying an old Sony ultraportable from a friend of mine. The laptop is in great condition but its no where near cutting edge.
here is the japanese spec list if anyone wants to look.
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I want to use it as a light weight note taker for next semester. It has XP on it currently, but part of the deal is it gets wiped. It also lacks a cd rom drive, not that that is an issue. Anyways I want a distro that is light enough for this old girl but is still capable enough to run the wifi on it and can run apps like open office. I have a gaming pc so flash and performance is a non-issue. This is strictly about size, weight, and endurance.

[zmatt]

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[Yek]

Get your hands on 7.10 Ubuntu, then grab WINE to emulate your office apps (unless your using open office o/c) - WI-FI may be a problem, do some research to see if they do any drivers for it

~ Tkey

[zmatt]

Ubuntu is not an option. This laptop is 850mhz with 256mb ram. That's why I asked for a light weight distro.

[CalcProgrammer1]

If you can, upgrade the RAM, then you can have Ubuntu run well on it.

I'm typing this, believe it or not, on an Ubuntu 8.04 system. Want the specs?

IBM ThinkPad A21p
Intel Pentium 3 850MHz
512MB PC133 SDRAM
1600x1200 LCD Display
Broadcom PCMCIA WiFi
ATi Mobility Rage 128 M3

If you can just double the RAM it'd run Ubuntu very well, especially since it probably has a better GPU than my way outdated Rage Mobility and a smaller screen than my laptop.

I've had Ubuntu running on a 256MB Celeron 500MHz desktop...I'm sure your computer could run it, though that was 7.04 or 7.10, not 8.04 (the Celeron board fried before 8.04 came out).

[zmatt]

Its an ultra portable, a Japanese model at that so I doubt it has anything but intel integrated. I considered upgrading the ram but 256meg sticks of pc133 SODIMMs are $25. so 512mb of that would cost almost as much as the ram in my desktop.

[CalcProgrammer1]

Ubuntu runs on Intel Integrated (i810 driver), actually even had 3d acceleration on my Celeron (which had an i810 integrated graphics chip). Ubuntu should run on your PC at usable speed, but if you want faster, Xubuntu is pretty much the same OS but it uses the XFCE environment (designed for lighter graphics hardware and less RAM). Xubuntu would probably run very well on your PC.

[zmatt]

Cool, what about language support? This laptop is a Japanese model and it has a dual function keyboard with with standard qwerty and Hiragana on it. The modes are switched with a button by the spacebar. Will this work properly in Linux? I'm actually taking Japanese as a language requirement for my degree and the ability to type in both character sets on my laptop would be invaluable.

[Yek]

Should be configureable through the Languages Manager.

[CalcProgrammer1]

I'm not sure, Ubuntu supports tons of languages, that's one of it's primary goals (accessibility by everyone) so I'd assume it'd work. The only problem would be if that keyboard used a Windows driver to do the switching, but more than likely it's done in hardware.