Shoutbox

Just a further point about RH, don't go with Fedora past say v2. After that it becomes really bloated.

I can't actually get FC5 to run on this machine but I think that's a USB Card-Drive incompatibility (I had to disable it to install Debian / Ubuntu as it causes the partitioner to stop responding from the constant disk there / disk not there). FC4 was quite bloated, I stopped using it.

I don't know why XFCE isn't working for you. You may need the proprietary drivers for your graphics card to be installed to get the full effect, but I doubt that matters much.

A further to Gentoo, I wouldn't fancy having to install / update on that system. The main point about Gentoo is that everything is compiled from source by emerge, so you have to recompile even for the most minor update.

If you're having real trouble, just stick with Windows 2000, I used to use that before XP and never really found much wrong with it.