I'm going to give Xubuntu a good try. It apparently runs well in 192MB RAM and well on low-power CPUs. I'm torrenting an ISO as we speak.

I've just installed UNR (Ubuntu Netbook Remix) but after reading the blurb I'm worried about the Intel Atom-specific build optimisations. It's a Pentium III at 866MHz with 384MB RAM. How does the Pentium III handle Atom specific builds of Ubuntu?

It has a Pentium III 866MHz and 384MB RAM.

Yup, I've used full-fat Ubuntu before, so it's a good suggestion. I guess I was hoping someone would say: Yeah, any good Linux distro with blah window manager in X11 build so-and-so

Oh, and the box is un-opened yet, so I don't know the RAM situation. I've got spare DIMMS and SIMMS though so I'm hoping to boost that as much as the BIOS / slots will allow.

Yeah, although the box comes with Win2K I'm likely to bin it and go with Linux. Thanks though.

I think the word you're looking for is British.

As a Nation, England ceased to exist around 1707.

Huygens' signal is extremely faint. It has the power of a mobile telephone and it is 1.4 billion kilometers from the Earth.

If I'm only 3 km from the Vodafone cell base station, why do I have problems getting signal?!

In the UK you can get an average GSM phone unlocked with a small bit of hardware available for about $50. There are lots of places which offer the service to unlock phones for you for a lot less than that.

Unlocking is often as simple as sending a couple of ASCII characters in on the serial port on the bottom on the handset. At worst, you need a special connector to connect to pins under the battery. There are no PIN codes etc that I know of that are required.

Some operators, like Orange, sometimes modify the firmware slightly adding some operator specific features, but this generally doesn't cause problems upon unlocking. For example I have a phone now running on another network, but it still has an Orange splash screen!