OT - which distro?

[dogscoff]

Been looking into Linux lately, and I have to say the choice of distros is pretty bewildering. Many of them have prohibitively high system requirements, others try o hard to be compact that they lose functionality or ease-of-use. I'm looking for something in the middle.

My first actual Linux install wil be to my otherwise defunct Toshiba laptop. I don't want to format my main PC just yet, not until I've had a chance to play.

Anyway, the PC in question is a Toshiba 470CDT. It has 32 meg ram, a 1st-generation pentium (a P166, I think) and about 2 gig HD. It ran Office and email and a web browser comfortably on Win98, so there ought to be a Linux out there somewhere that will offer similar functionality: Ie, open office or similar, firefox, thunderbird, all from a proper GUI (can't be doing with text-only stuff, sorry.)

I'd like a distro that lets me learn about Linux, but at the same time I need something that will pick up all of the important hardware automatically. I want to climb in the shallow end, not jump in ddep=-)

Distros I've looked into:
Ubuntu: System requirements way too high. Forget it.

Puppy Linux: Looks like fun, but it wants to run entirely out of a ram-disk, and for that it requires 128meg mem. There is an option to install to HD, which presumably reduces the memory requirements, but I can't see anywhere what that reduction would be. Anyone got experience with this?

Damn Small Linux. Looks nice, and I've played with the Live CD. However I still get the feeling that compromises are being made to cram it all into 50 meg. I don't mind if the installed OS takes up a few hundred meg of HD space, I'd rather have the full functionality that my machine can handle.

BasicLinux: Designed to run on machines even older than mine, and fits into about 3meg. Ridiculously small and it has to be severely limited as a result, but I applaud the effort, and thought it might be fun to play with.

Anyone recommend any others? Maybe I need to be looking at older versions of current distros. Anyone able to give me a clue? Am I barking up the wrong tree looking at LiveCD distros?

Oh, and while I'm here, another question: How easy is it to install new software to a distro? Most of them have a list of apps that come with the distro, but if I wanted to add, say, openoffice or wesnoth or slashem, is it a straightforward process? Will such programs work on some distros but not others or are they likely to run on any Linux?