OS for an old-ish laptop?

[pne]

So, a while ago I won a laptop in the company's "get rid of old hardware before we move" lottery—the one I used to use when on outside assignments, in fact. (Well, I swapped what I actually won, a monitor, for it, partly out of nostalgia.)

Unfortunately, it wouldn't boot any more as the hard drive had apparently given up the ghost, which was a pity. So I bought a new hard drive off eBay.

That's in there now and it seems to be fine mechanically, judging by a little HD health program I booted from a floppy. Now I'm considering what to throw on the new drive, which is empty (at least the partition table is).

The old hard drive came with a Windows NT licence, judging by a sticker on it, and so I nabbed a WinNT installation CD-ROM from the pile they were throwing out. (Unfortunately, I didn't get to the box that belonged to that particular laptop in time so I don't have any special drivers or vendor-specific software etc., and I'm not sure whether vanilla WinNT will install on it.)

I've also considered installing Linux of some flavour or other on it and simply dispensing with WinNT. I'm not sure what I'd use it for, really, other than vague thoughts of running KliFlash to practise Klingon vocabulary, which is a Windows application. But maybe Wine can take care of that. Otherwise, maybe the odd game or bit of word processing, which Linux should also be fine for. (I have no games in particular in mind, but it couldn't be anything current; I think it's a Pentium II running at 333 MHz with 128 MB of RAM and 6 GB of hard drive space.)

So I thought I'd ask my readers for suggestions. What do you think I should stick on the laptop?

[Poll #527099]

Comments are also welcome. FWIW, my first thought was Debian; now I'm leaning vaguely towards Ubuntu since I've heard it may be more user-friendly and more up-to-date.

Comments

[opal1159.livejournal.com]

If it's old, XP probably won't work...other than that I know nothing. :)

[lexabear.livejournal.com]

It doesn't seem like you're seriously considering XP, but I'll repeat opal anyway and warn against it. I recently upgraded my laptop to XP and it's sloooow now - it's also an older model (850mhz/128 ram) that I should've considered against XP's minimum requirements before jumping into it. I wouldn't say I regret it (it's certainly better than rebooting 5 times a day like I had to under ME), but it's not without its drawbacks.