Well, I've finally installed SUSE 9.3, the install process was rather smooth, and didn't require much beyond choosing a root password.
The idea is that I'll be able to develop for linux on this machine. It's a P3 500 with 384Mb RAM and 10Gb HD, and it has some serious problems handling the UI.
The surfing performance is visibly slower since Firefox takes so long to draw the page.
Nevertheless, the UI is immediately familiar & usable and I can
make headway into starting to use it. The idea is to also turn this
system into Subversion server, hopefully I'll also conquer the
mysteries of Apache and would be able to turn this into a web server as
well.
Enough for now, I think.
Good night