[dogscoff]

Thanks for the advice. I will definitely look into that lightweight Ubuntu Fyron mentioned. It will be either that or DSL that goes onto my old toshiba P1/32 meg laptop. Puppy looks nice but I'm not sure it will run happily on such a low-spec machine, even installed to HD (reformatting the drive is not an issue: I have no reason to keep Windoze on this machine.)

My current laptop (Sony p3 1400/ 128meg) will eventually go with whatever distro ends up on the Tosh. Easier to maintain them both if they are the same. The Viao ran the DSL live CD beautifully. Unfortunately I can't just go ahead and install on that one straight away because the wife uses it a lot and she will resent the transition to something new and different. Therefore I am not putting a new OS in front of her until I've ironed out any teething problems and am in a position to answer all her queries immediately. Dual boot would be a good compromise, except I don't really have the HD space free for it.

However, if I can re-house her onto the little Tosh or a refurbed Dell she might be getting soon, so that we each have a PC of our own, then I can do whatever I like to the Sony=-)

I used to use Lynx way back in the day at uni, and even now I consider PINE the best damn email client I've ever used, so I'm not afraid of CLI-only apps and systems. However I wouldn't have much use for a non-GUI machine.
Maybe I'm just a spoiled Windows-generation brat, but I want an environment that is nice to look at as well as functional, that displays graphics and video, and I rather like the idea of controlling things by point-and-click rather than memorising and typing in countless commands and their parameters. There's a reason the world moved to WIMP-systems.

Besides, in my mind whatever Linux I install should look at least as advanced as the Windows it replaces (except for special cases like servers, where a CLI would probably do just fine), or there's no point. To go from win98 to a CLI-only environment would feel as though installing Linux is a step backwards, not forwards.

In other news, I will get a good chance to play with Linux installation this week. Yesterday I lent my Ubuntu live CD to my Dad for him to play with and (thanks largely to all the beers he'd just had the pub=-) he managed to click the "install Ubunutu" button, repartition his hard drive and wipe Windows off altogether. He now has a beautifully running Ubuntu laptop (An Evesham.co.uk Quest something or other- REALLY nice machine), but he's lost his Outlook email history and address book, and probably a load of other data as well. Luckily his most important stuff *was* backed up.

So now I have to try to recover whatever lost data I can (anyone recommend a good file recovery proggy for Ubuntu?) and put Windows XP back on for him. I'll be installing Ubuntu as a dual-boot option=-)