Funny, I've totally missed out on a couple of the major distros so far - Debian and Fedora come to mind.

I must look for that one, oxie. It might just work on some of the antiques. (Although nothing, but nothing, boots from an MMX CPU any more.)

I've sometimes had more success installing something to an actual computer rather than VirtualBox. I tend to use one of the old wrecks I pick up on eBay. Most people are more self-disciplined and prefer not to have twenty dead laptops cluttering the place up.

I think it was ej who suggested keeping a small partition on one's daily-use computer specifically for trying out distros. Thanks to the magic of GRUB, this is unlikely to lead to boot problems.

And if it does, there's always fixmbr then something like PLOP to launch the guest system.

What I really need is masses of money so that I can get a decent computer. But that could take some of the fun out of it, too. (Time to fire up the Toughbook again - 300MHz PII and 256MB of RAM - used to positively fly with AntiX. That distro of oxie's looks promising, though.)