Back in mid-April, I had reported success with VL-Lite 5.9b3 on my geriatric thinkpad 380z (p2-233, 153mb, 10gb), and thankfully the story remains the same with b5. VL remains the only distro that successfully installs on this machine, probably due to some unusual features on the motherboard, including an ISA bus and a cd-rom drive that many distros have difficulty reading from. The remaining distros that pass those two hurdles are apparently much worse at hardware detection than VL or aren't optimized for older hardware. Thus, once again, I give thanks.
Meanwhile, I tried out LXDE. It looks great. I'll have to figure out how to use it.
By the way, this may be off topic (so feel free to redirect me), but I can't find streamtuner in the repos. I have searched this forum, and it looks to me like it is packaged in SOHO. Is streamtuner compatable with VL-Lite? If no, can someone suggest the lightest possible alternative? For whatever reason, the old lappie is having a hell of a time streaming audio. It worked fine under Win98, so I know the hardware can handle it. Thanks.