World: r3wp

I'm mostly using Debian, what's the better GUI: KDE or Gnome?

Seems like Gnome is the standard...

Both are the standards, depending on who you ask. That's the great 
thing about standards - there are so many of them.

Oh, and XFCE is another standard that has been gaining some traction.

Ubuntu 9.10 is quite good. I've only had to visit the terminal a 
couple of times to get SMB filesharing working since I first booted 
it 5 minutes ago and only one cryptic error message appeared.

Wow... 420MB download for stripped down Gnome...

Robert, IMHO, neither desktop is any good. KDE is well engineered 
underneath but the end user design is clueless. Here Gnome is better, 
but suffers from poor code quality, and have basically been spending 
close to 10 years rectifying that.

That's right on the mark

Allen, does that Thinkpad still have the default 32 MB memeory? Then 
there are very few Linuxes you could use

Even if it has more, to have a workable installation you need an 
extremely lean distro

Here's a very good one:

http://slitaz.org/

He'll need one of the loram-cdrom versions to work on that little 
memory:

http://download.tuxfamily.org/slitaz/iso/2.0/flavors/

Slitaz has modern applications such as the new Firefox, but running 
those will be out of the question

Here's a Linux with older apps especially for old machines:

http://www.delilinux.org/

Its development has almost stopped, though

At the danger of sounding repetitive, Syllable is one of the few 
systems you could reasonably try on such a low-memory machine - especially 
for an Amiga enthusiast

I really like the zillions distros to choose from... makes my system 
unique around the world. :-)

No modding or pimping required.

Yup, no better way to maximise complexity than to let every user 
build their own operating system

Gentoo then ;)

i think I will give Ubunto a try. IIRC it's debian based.

Looking at moblin now for a netbook for a 7-year old (school requirement). 
Anyone tried that?

I'm using Mint.

is it 7-year-old friendly? :-)

Is any computer system? Depends on the 7-year old. But Mint is the 
least worst

well, i went to distrowatch, tried a few of them, and mint seemed 
the best for me. i'd love to use gobo instead, but when i tried it 
everything self-destroyed on the first update.

I guess I can read a bit about it.

Does it make sense to use Ubuntu 64bit or is 32bit better?

I need to compile stuff for 32bit as well.

As well? Does that include 64 bits? Then you can't do that without 
a 64 bits installation

i have the 64bit version of Mint. never had any problems with 32 
bit apps, and the system is 20% faster than the 32 bit version (I 
actually tested this), and able to use all my RAM and not just part 
of it.

if you have more than 2 GB of RAM, there are just too many advantages 
to using the 64 bit version.

Mint includes the 32bit libs - one of the many reasons it is a great 
Linux distro :)

Any other killer features?

they have a number of GUIs but i've never used them. (like for sharing 
files with other people etc.)

otherwise, it's Ubuntu with more QA :)

(and a better non-brown theme)

Ubuntu and QA in the same sentence? :-)

well, in the level that you can get on Linux of course.

anyway, don't listen to me, just download the live cd, look at it, 
and trash it if you don't like it.

For me, Ubuntu feels worse than Win98 in QA, so yes, that's why I 
question the QA abilities of the Ubuntu team. It looks to me that 
they only test the first 30 seconds of desktop usage.

Hmm... ok. What I need is a debian based simple distro. So, it sounds 
like MINT is a good choice.

If by simple you mean user oriented, then yes

robert, as a rolling release system ARCH could be a solution as well. 

it is not DEBIAN based (closer concept to BSD and GENTOO) but it 
is very fast, stable and alway fresh. 

the configuration e.g. is central and very logic. I am using it with 
a small footprint XFCE
for desktop-virtualisation, just running...and running...

I don't think Robert would like Arch for a desktop (too much configuration), 
but as a server, maybe

Correct, I just need a simple (not much to configure) system so that 
I can compile some code, that will than be transfered to my server 
system. I avoid compiling on my server.

On the server I use EisXen. Sof far OK, but the update/upgrade route 
is bad.