PM me if you're interested.My story...
I had futzed around with Ubuntu in college. This was on and off in 2007 and 2008. On my old Toshiba 1415-S173 (Willamette P4 (IIRC), half a gig of RAM) Ubuntu 7.04 (and later, 7.10 and 8.04) floundered at about the same speed as my HP s7220n desktop (Celeron M, a full gig of RAM) ran XP. I was mildly impressed, and kept poking at Linux over the next couple years, even though the Toshiba died before Ubuntu 8.10 happened (to this day I'm not sure what failed; I suspect the CPU, but I never did get around to the autopsy...).
A year or so after college, a friend of mine gave me a Pentium III desktop. I attempted to load an old version of Xubuntu on it, and encountered easily the strangest hardware failure I've ever encountered. It had a CD-RW drive that, as my Xubuntu install CD was read, it wrote garbage data back and corrupted the CD itself. I'm really not sure how that works... all I know is, I replaced both CD and drive before the system would boot.
At around the same time, I started fooling around with a very strange system I'd actually purchased. It's an odd sort of computer called a "thin client" -- for those not familiar with such things, it's basically a remote-desktop sort of thing. A thin client is a small-form-factor PC with just enough brains and storage to act as a display and input adapter for a network cable, so that one can compute far away from the actual host system. All the real computation is done on a virtual machine in a server somewhere fairly distant, using SSL/SSH and VPN type stuff to link the two. For this reason, thin clients tend to be marginally more capable, performance-wise, than a graphing calculator -- and with no real hard drive at that. Almost all use what's called a "DiskOnModule" or DOM -- an IDE (or, rarely, SATA) flash disk. They're physically tiny, and I've yet to see one larger than half a gig. It's just enough space to shoehorn in XP Embedded and something like a Citrix client, to make everything work. (For those who lived through the 70s, the idea of a thin client is not too dissimilar from a VT100 terminal -- except that the serial link is now a 10/100 LAN cable, and you get real actual graphics and Web browsing and such.)
I was trying, at the time, to teach this particular thin client (which was especially anemic, since it was an older model!) how to be a proper desktop computer. I knew that XP wasn't going to cut it, and I couldn't afford a retail copy anyways. I looked around for something lighter-weight than Ubuntu (which would have very likely refused to even install on that heap) and I found something called WattOS that was just barely beginning to start at the time. I posted something on their forum that asked a few questions. Around that point, the people on another forum I browse (it's a computer performance-enthusiasts' forum, entertainingly enough) kept saying "WattOS? WTF is WattOS? You should try this Puppy Linux thing that people have actually heard of." A week went by, no response from the WattOS people... I posted on this very forum, had eager help in less than two hours (I want to say it was in less than one hour!) and the rest, as they say, was history.
I now run Puppy full-time. I've had a few Pups, but the current one is Puppy 57 non-PAE (I keep meaning to fix that) with jejy69's MATE 181 SFS plunked on top. For the record, getting used to Puppy from Win7 -- took me all of ~30 minutes.
My mother is in love with XP and Win7 and won't touch Puppy. She's been hearing "you get what you pay for" for so long that she can't seem to un-believe it. She's also convinced that learning a new OS is insanely hard. It'd actually be funny if it weren't kind of sad...
