My friend wants a laptop for her birthday, so I'm thinking of grabbing a really old laptop of mine and sticking a linux distro on it. What linux distro is good for a small HDD/Processor? I'm thinking of Damn Small Linux, but I don't want it to run like crap. I'm extremely new to linux so I've barely tried any distros. Thanks for any replies.

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Damn Small works quite well on old hardware (once configured properly, I had some trouble initially on my old craptop), though you might have some luck with Xubuntu. [Modified by: Kiski on June 30, 2008 02:18 AM]

Xubuntu would be good. Also Vector or Puppy linux. Puppy may provide the easiest OOTB configuration, while Xubuntu would have the largest repository and community support. Vector is slightly faster than Xubuntu, in my experience. Whatever you choose, consider Xvesa if you have problems with your graphics. DSL is great for a light PC, but the software repository is very limited. If you want software beyond that, you'll have to do a lot of work since it has a minimal configuration (2.4 kernel, need extras to compile from source, etc.). It's handy, but less easily set up as a full desktop environment for the average user.