Earlier I tried Slackware 15 on my ancient IBM Thinkpad T40 (circa 2004-ish).
It installed, and ran, and by choosing Xfce as the desktop environment, it even had a functional GUI. (I wasn't silly enough to try KDE).
However, despite the browsers being up to date, Seamonkey crashed when trying to load a site, Firefox locked up the whole computer, and Konqueror (the only other option) crashed on load.
So I decided to step back abit. I've installed OpenSolaris 2008.5 which runs quite smoothly (this laptop has 512Mb of RAM). Its ancient Gnome 2.20.2 is even up to the task. Firefox 2 is installed, which unsurprisingly won't load any SSL site, but sadly ssh won't connect to anything useful either due to lacking modern encryption.
As a distraction-less typewriter, it'd work a treat, but this isn't the answer for a useable network connected machine.
